Theories of Development
by GingerbreadPoppet
Summary: A series of one-shots/missing scenes on how the Cutter/Rubirosa relationship evolved. Takes place over the course of Season 19.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note: I've decided to start a connected series of one-shots, filling in the blanks behind a Cutter/Rubirosa relationship, and how it might have happened. It's not intended to be one whole story with an overarching plot (beyond the one that's already canon) – if it works, it'll be more a series of missing scenes, beginning early in this season.**

**Also: usual disclaimer.**

**(Post-"Falling")**

She knew that Mike was still in a bad mood when he stalked past her desk at the close of business on Friday with nothing more than a brusque "See you Monday," and without giving her time to respond in kind.

It had been one of those cases. They were all bad, of course – it was the nature of the job. They only varied by greater or lesser degrees of what her younger sister would refer to as "suckitude." Some of them got to you more than others. The case with Sofia Archer, the soap star who'd adopted her very own accessory baby…that had been Connie's. This one, it seemed, had been Mike's. To make matters worse, his attempts to prevent Lacy Talbot's parents from having surgery performed on their disabled daughter had culminated in Jack showing up in court earlier that day to very publicly call Mike off.

She felt sorry for him, even though she also thought that Jack had done the right thing. When they'd been at the hospital a few days earlier, to check on the comatose Amelia Lazaro, she'd lost track of Mike somewhere around the nurse's station and found him slumped in a chair by the patient's bed. She'd gently told him that she agreed with the judge's decision to reject Mike's initial attempt to add an assault charge onto those already facing Lacy's parents. It was a wasted effort, and she didn't miss the slightly accusatory tone in his voice when he'd answered her: "You just have to try and save who you can save." She supposed that he'd simply taken for granted that she would hop on board the Cutter train the way she had so often in the past.

And so, after the debacle in court today, she'd given him what she thought was time to cool off before knocking on his office door with the part of the completed paperwork from the case. The lights were off, save for one lamp, and he was sitting at his desk tossing a baseball from one hand to the other and back again, a distracted expression on his face. As far as bad moods went, it wasn't up there with his pacing around and swinging a baseball bat, but it wasn't a good sign, either. As a result, Connie wasn't surprised when he'd barely looked up as she placed the files on his table.

"Here's the initial paperwork on the Talbot plea agreement."

No response. Connie sighed. "Mike?"

He glanced up finally and the baseball stilled. "Paperwork. Right."

"The new file we've opened for the Kessler case is there as well, like you asked." She paused. "Mike? The Kessler file? You said you needed it."

"Sure." The baseball resumed its journeys from hand to hand.

She toyed with the idea of slipping out of the room right then and got as far the door before turning around and leaning against the frame. "Anything you feel like talking about?"

For a moment, she wasn't sure if he'd heard her, or if he'd heard her and was simply ignoring her, but he put down the baseball and turned his chair to face her. He even opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it, shaking his head.

"Nothing you want to hear about."

"Try me."

He snorted. "I can't. Not without maligning your mentor." He gestured vaguely in the direction of Jack's office. "And that would violate our agreement. Actually, I'm pretty sure it would end up violating both of them"

A ghost of a smile flitted across her face. _Oh yes. The agreements_. There had been two of them struck within the first month of their working together. Number one: no complaining about Jack in front of Connie. Number two: tone down the language, please. It had rapidly become apparent that Mike's eloquence extended far beyond the courtroom; he was also familiar with a variety of four-letter words and had made frequent and diverse use of most of them before Connie had finally told him to can it.

Now, leaning against the door frame, she considered giving him temporary immunity from both agreements. Before she could offer it, though, he'd turned away, picked up his Blackberry and begun stabbing at the buttons. She threw up her hands in a "whatever" gesture and returned to her desk. _Still pissed_, she thought, sitting down and hitting the space bar to wake up her computer. _Pissed at me for not cheerleading, pissed at Jack, pissed at the Talbots, pissed at the world. _

It was about half an hour later when he'd swept past her with that curt goodnight. She watched, and cringed, as Jack emerged from the hallway and awkwardly waited for the elevator next to Mike. The tension between the two was palpable. She could see that Jack was saying something, but from the set of Mike's shoulders, whatever it was clearly wasn't mollifying him.

She put a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes, feeling a headache coming on. It was eight-thirty on a Friday night. Her own Blackberry was full of texts from friends who were out, enjoying a nice dinner, plotting a nice drink in a nice bar, and definitely not sitting in a near-empty office and developing a migraine. _Screw it._ She picked up the Blackberry and read the latest email from Tanya, her best friend from law school ("Going to B-flat after dinner. There 9pm latest. Five blocks from your office. NO EXCUSES!"). Smiling, she gathered up a few files from her desk, stuffed them into her briefcase and shut down the computer. A drink with friends now, brunch with another friend tomorrow morning, and a lazy day on Sunday were calling to her. And Mike could do whatever the hell it was he did on the weekends and hopefully get all the angst and brooding out of his system by Monday. She clicked off the lamp on her desk and left the office.

***

She woke up the next morning in her Park Slope apartment ever so slightly hungover. The drinks had been good, but strong, and Tanya – thrilled to see Connie after a busy month for both of them – had cornered her in a booth and insisted on an in-depth catching-up session. Connie had been pleased with how rapidly she'd been able to shrug off the past few days, in spite of the presence of one other, very young, ADA and two defense attorneys, as reminders of her job. (_Lawyers, lawyers, everywhere_, she'd thought morosely when she sat down and was introduced to them.) Unfortunately, the presence of the other lawyers meant that Mike Cutter had, in a way, even managed to make an appearance at the bar when one of the defense attorneys, who was new to New York, had asked her which EADA she was working with.

"Mike Cutter." She'd replied, crisply.

"Who's Mike Cutter?" The other defense attorney had inquired, tuning in to the conversation. Before Connie could answer, the other ADA had piped up, grinning.

"He's a hottie."

Connie stared at her before cracking up with the rest of the table. "Excuse me?"

"I'm just saying." The other ADA (Cara? Tara? Connie couldn't remember through the hangover.) "He's kind of a hottie. We all think so."

At this, Connie had raised her index finger._ Speak for yourself._

Cara/Tara noticed. "Well, a lot of us do. I mean, he's _older_." Connie snickered. Mike was (she suspected) in his early forties, but to someone in their mid-twenties, early forties qualified as _older._ Practically geriatric. "But, you know. He's cute."

Tanya glanced at Connie. "And you have failed to mention this because…"

"He's my boss." Connie reached down and shoved her briefcase out of the way of her legs. "And for the last few days, he's not anything other than a pain in my ass, so can we talk about something else?"

They had. They conversation had been good, and Connie had ended up staying later than she planned before catching the R train home.

She rolled over in bed and peered at the clock on the side table. Nine o'clock. Crap. She needed to get moving now or risk being late to meet Megan for their weekly brunch on the Upper West Side.

Within half an hour, she'd showered, dressed, grabbed her briefcase (reading material on the subway) and headed for the nearest stop. She arrived on time at Columbus Circle and made her way to the restaurant, where Meg was already waiting for her.

They talked about their respective weeks. Meg was on maternity leave, having had her daughter nine months ago. Every week had new stories: baby's first smile, baby's first tooth, baby's first noise that both parents had convinced themselves sounded almost exactly like either "Mama" or "Dada." It has been an odd shift in their friendship. _Not bad_, Connie thought. _Just odd._ Meg was self-conscious about talking too much about the baby, about becoming what she referred to as "one of the Upper West Side mommy brigade." Connie, for her part, was self-conscious about what she feared was a repetitive same-yness of her description of her life during the work-week. ("I worked. I came home and opened a can of soup. I fell asleep on the couch. I went to work the next day.") At the same time, she tried to underplay the times she did go out, socialize, date, knowing that Meg had found the transition to being at home difficult.

Still, their friendship seemed to be making the adjustment easily, and they had moved on to other topics - TV shows, the news, vacation plans – when Connie's Blackberry began to chirp insistently. She glanced down. It was Mike.

She smiled apologetically at Meg. "It's work. I have to take this." To his credit, Mike – like Jack – was good about respecting personal time, unless imposing on it was unavoidable. The occasional text or urgent email was more usual. A telephone call was rarer still.

She picked up the phone. "Hi, Mike."

As usual, he didn't bother with niceties. "Where's the Kessler file?"

"The what?"

"The Kessler file. You drew up that subpoena yesterday, and you were supposed to give it to me yesterday evening with the rest of the file."

Connie heaved a sigh. "I did. I came into your office with the Talbot paperwork and put it on your table _along with the Kessler file_. I told you that I was doing it." Then, because she couldn't resist, she added: "You were playing with your baseball at the time."

There was a brief moment of silence. Then: "It's not here."

"It was on your table."

"Well here's the thing, Connie. If it was on my table, it would have gone in my briefcase, along with the rest of the stuff I put in there, and it would now be on my coffee table." This was followed by the sound of papers being shuffled around. "It's not here."

"I don't know what to tell you, Mike." She made what she hoped was an apologetic gesture at Meg. "It must still be on your table."

Mike responded by dispensing with part two of their year-long agreement and muttering one of his favorite four-letter words. She decided to let it go; it was the weekend, after all.

"Can't it wait until Monday?" she asked.

"Not really. I'll head in to work later and hunt it down." There was a pause and the sound of more shuffling papers. "Sorry to bother you. I'll see you Monday."

"Fine." She hung up, and she and Meg resumed their conversation. She'd forgotten all about the Kessler file, in fact, until their brunch was over. It was then, an hour after Mike had called, that she reached into her briefcase to extract her wallet, which had wedged itself between a dog-eared copy of Fashionelle and…

"Damn it."

She waited until she and Meg had said their goodbyes to make the call, secretly hoping that he wouldn't pick up. He did.

"Hello?"

"It's Connie. Have you already gone in to work?"

"I just left my apartment."

"I, uh…" _Might as well come out with it._ "I found the Kessler file."

Silence.

"Mike?"

"Where?"

"In my briefcase. I just found it a few minutes ago. I guess I didn't put it on your table."

"Guess not."

She suddenly had an idea. "Don't you live on the Upper West Side?"

"Why?"

"I'm in the area. Sort of. I'm at Columbus Circle. I could meet you and give you the file."

"How's Cherry Hill Fountain in twenty minutes?"

She agreed, not missing the faint tone of surprise in his voice.

They hung up and Connie headed across the street towards Central Park. Mike, apparently, was still not over the Talbot case or, she suspected, his wounded pride from the Jack thing. And, okay, she'd slightly inconvenienced him with the confusion over the Kessler file, but she'd only set him back by, what? A few hours? She'd expected a little more enthusiasm for her offer to hand him the file personally in his own neighborhood, not least because it had occurred to her that he might not be opposed to seeing her outside the office. They'd gone out for the occasional after-work drink, usually after a difficult case, and granted, he'd never suggested meeting up beyond that. His most obvious flirtation with her had taken place during one trial last year, and she'd realized to her embarrassment, that it had been part of a broader scheme to sway one of the jurors who been admiring her. And yet, sometimes, she'd be reading a file or tapping away on her computer and she'd look up to catch him gazing at her with a slight smile. Other times, she'd thought that maybe he was standing a little closer than necessary. She found she didn't really mind, even though she should have. She found that, in spite of herself, she shared last night's opinions of Mike Cutter. But the fact that both of them, she believed, had the sense not to do anything about it was reassuring.

She walked up to the fountain and sat down on one of the surrounding benches, expecting to have to wait a while for him, beginning to resent having had to rush the end of brunch with Meg in order to get Mike a file. A file which, in spite of what he claimed, probably could wait until Monday. To her surprise, within five minutes of sitting down, she became aware of someone standing in front of her. She raised her eyes and there he was. She'd never seen him dressed casually and she thought, not for the first time, how odd it often was to see people outside the office in something other than suits.

He removed the sunglasses he'd been wearing. "Hi."

Connie found that her annoyance hadn't quite faded. She stood up and handed him the file. "Here."

"Thanks." He accepted it and stood there, looking a little embarrassed. "Sorry to drag you out here."

She shrugged, picked up her briefcase, and stood up.

Mike glanced around at the crowds wandering in park, then back at her. "Have you eaten?"

"Actually, I was in the middle of brunch with a friend when you called." It came out more clipped than she intended and she relented. "I could use a walk, though." She patted her stomach and smiled at him. "Eggs benedict."

He smiled back, and they turned towards the wide staircase that led down to the fountain. It wasn't until they'd reached the top and began walking that he spoke again.

"It was a bad case."

"I know."

"I'll get over it."

"Good."

"I've been completely out of line."

"Yep."

She heard him chuckle slightly, and she nudged him with her elbow. "You can malign Jack a little bit, you know. I mean, if you really need to talk. Just…don't push it."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

It was, as it turned out, the only time they discussed work during the hour and a half that followed. They continued to walk. They got coffee. She left him at Columbus Circle and rode the subway home. And when she saw him again on Monday he was, as he'd promised, over it.


	2. Chapter 2

**In and around "Sweetie" (part one)**

Mike Cutter was distracted. Until a few moments ago, he'd been reading through the case file related to the murder of Dale Marks, otherwise known as Sweetie Ness. The arraignment of the suspect, Cody Larson, was about an hour away and he was engaging in his usual tactic of trying to see the case through the eyes of Larson's lawyer, in the hope of preempting any surprises. He flipped through the documents, frowned, and looked up at Connie, who was sitting at the table near his desk, reviewing another case while she waited for him to hand back the Marks file. She was tapping her pen against her lips while she read and, although his mouth was open to speak, distraction set in and he found himself studying her instead.

This was no longer unusual for him. For the past year, Mike – who had once prided himself on his single-mindedness regarding his career – would find himself talking to Connie about tactics on a case, reviewing the grisly details of a coroner's report, and simultaneously wondering what kissing her would be like. At first it was almost amusing. Granted, she was attractive. More than attractive, actually. It was a normal response, and one that he was easily able to shrug off. It served him right, he supposed, that after all those years of scrupulously separating his work life and personal life (such as it was), he should have developed a schoolboy crush on a colleague. Not just any colleague, either, but his own assistant.

Within a few months of working with her, though, the amusement gave way to something resembling annoyance. Not with her, but with himself. It had turned out that she was, as a juror had once informed her in an email, the total package. This realization did not make him happy. First, because he was operating under the assumption that he didn't stand a chance with her. He knew he was attractive to women; at least, he'd never had problem drawing them, even if keeping them was another matter. Connie, however, was in another league entirely, as well as being more than a decade younger than him. Second, and just as importantly, was the fact that she was his assistant. He hadn't worked his way up the ladder at the DA's Office just to get himself a reputation for sleeping with his staff. In this regard, he was happy to be nothing like Jack McCoy.

As a result, he has been surprised and faintly irritated to find himself becoming more and more preoccupied in her presence. To make matters worse – or better; he hadn't decided yet – their meeting a few weeks ago in Central Park had seemed to herald some sort of shift in their interaction as far as she was concerned. Previously, she had seemed more reserved around him, joining him for the occasional after-work drink, being friendly, but rarely revealing anything personal about herself or her feelings. Then they'd walked through the park (on a Saturday, no less) sat on a bench and had coffee and actually talked beyond work, beyond the courtroom and beyond simple pleasantries. It wasn't as though they'd bared their souls to each other, but for a few hours at least, it was as if they weren't colleagues, just two people getting to know each other.

They hadn't spent time together in the month that had passed since then – at least, not outside of the few square blocks surrounding Hogan Place – but during that month, and for the first time, she had been the one to suggest lunch, or a drink after work. He'd even come in to work one day to find a book on his chair and a note in her handwriting. ("Here's that novel I was telling you about yesterday. Let me know what you think of it.") There was no flirtation, and he didn't kid himself that there was an attraction on her part, but he sensed, for the first time, that after cautiously weighing him up for the past year or so, she had decided that she liked him.

He liked her, too, although those feelings were occasionally obscured by something a little less platonic and a lot more physical. Like now, for instance, when instead of focusing his attention on the case file he found himself hypnotized by the tapping of her pen against her lips and the way her hair was falling across her face. He shook himself and returned to the documents in front of him, flipping through them one more time, before clearing his throat. She looked up expectantly, the pen coming to rest.

"Everything in order?"

He nodded. "Looks like. Where's the affidavit from Lupo?"

She rolled her eyes. When tracking down Larson, Cyrus Lupo had drawn on his law school studies and executed a search of Larson's hotel room by obtaining the permission of another of its "occupants." It should hold up, Mike thought, but then again, it was something that the defense might pick on.

"He and Bernard are bringing it by in about fifteen minutes. They're coming to the arraignment."

"Did he send you a draft?"

"It's on my desk. Hold on a sec." She rose and walked out of the room, unaware of Mike's admiring gaze as she did so.

She returned a minute later with a printed email, which she handed to him. He scanned it quickly.

"Anything in here to indicate that Lupo and Bernard had reason to believe the guy was a john?"

"I don't think so." She came around to his side of the desk and leaned over his shoulder to re-read it. Her arm brushed his and he could smell the perfume she was wearing. He closed his eyes briefly before pushing his chair back from his desk, thanking her and excusing himself to go and speak to Jack.

When he left Jack's office about twenty minutes later, he could see Bernard and Lupo standing by Connie's desk as she shrugged into her coat. Bernard was clearly in the middle of telling a story, and judging by the pained-but-stoic look on Lupo's face, it was apparently at his partner's expense.

"Anyway, the first hooker he comes across looks like RuPaul, so he says," here Bernard affected an awkward-sounding voice, apparently meant to be Cyrus. "'I'm looking for a man who's…all man.'"

Mike smirked as Lupo's expression shifted from stoic to sheepish. He heard Connie laugh.

"I wish I'd seen it."

Bernard reached into his coat pocket. "Oh, no problem. I took pictures." He handed her Blackberry, and she peered at it with a smile.

"I like the hat." She spotted Mike as he was turning into his office and held the Blackberry out to him.

Mike glanced at it. "Very fetching, Detective. Did you bring the affidavit?"

Lupo nodded at Connie. "Handed it over first thing. You think this'll hold up?"

He shrugged. "It should. We'll find out soon enough." Returning to his office, he removed a pen from his desk drawer and stood at his whiteboard, contemplating another case that had recently landed on his desk. A few seconds later he saw Connie and the two detectives heading towards the elevators. He thought about calling after her to remind her to text him with the outcome of the arraignment, before reminding himself that he didn't have to. She never needed reminding, never needed to be told twice. _Ten bucks says she was class valedictorian_, he thought idly.

Sure enough, he'd been at his whiteboard for about an hour, sifting through various police reports, sketching up a matrix connecting people and places, dispatching a junior ADA to look up a precedent in case law, when he heard the pipping of his Blackberry, indicating a new message. It was from Connie.

"Remand. Meeting with Larson's lawyer Riker's 1:30pm OK?"

He smiled, returned the text ("Thanks. 1:30 fine."), and turned his attention back to the whiteboard.

***

The meeting at Riker's did not go well. As Mike had half-expected, Larson's lawyer had presented them with a motion to exclude the bloody shirt that had been found in the hotel room, arguing that the other "occupant" had been a "client." To make matters worse, the judge had later agreed. The shirt was out. He sent Connie to nail down Janice Dunlap, their one possible witness, and headed back to the office to inform Jack.

He hadn't spoken to Connie for the rest of what remained of that day, which was probably just as well. Jack's reaction had been predictable. He'd muttered something about cops playing lawyer, an opinion Mike shared. Still, the earful he got from the DA didn't leave him in a good mood, and he left the office wanting nothing more than his apartment, a glass of scotch, ESPN, and – most importantly – no interaction with other human beings. When he emerged from his subway stop on 86th Street, however, he walked only half a block before his Blackberry began to chirp with a phone call. He answered it without looking at the caller ID.

"Mike Cutter."

"Hey. It's Connie."

"You're not still at the office are you?" he asked. He heard a faint laugh echo down the line.

"No, I'm at home. Listen, I spoke to Janice Dunlap, _and_ I requested a visitor's log from Riker's. It turns out…"

Mike checked his watch, saw that it was nine-thirty and decided, for once, to call it a day.

"Connie? Will all of this keep until tomorrow, or is there anything I need to do on it tonight?"

She paused, mid-sentence, caught off-guard. He didn't blame her; he was rarely off-duty.

"No, it'll keep." Another pause. "Bad day?"

"Just long." He had a sudden thought. "Look, why don't we talk about this over breakfast tomorrow? I could meet you at seven-thirty."

"Where? The place with the good coffee and the greasy food, or the place with the healthy food and the bad coffee?"

"Good coffee, greasy food." He entered his building, nodded politely at the doorman, and called the elevator. Five more minutes and he'd have a drink. Six minutes and he'd be lying on the couch with his feet up. He suddenly felt exhausted.

She sighed. "Fine. Remind me to send you the bill for my cholesterol meds. See you then."

He hung up, opened the door to his apartment, and dropped his briefcase onto the floor with a thud, enjoying the blessed silence for a minute before finding a couple of aspirin for his headache and chasing them with a glass of scotch. He glanced at the briefcase on the floor, considered it for a moment, and then retrieved a couple of files and read through them, while half-heartedly watching a football game. At midnight he peeled himself off the couch and went to bed.

********

Anita Van Buren liked to test her deductive skills when she could, especially now that she spent so much of her time dealing with day-to-day management issues. So when she arrived at the diner at 8:30am and sat in the waiting area for the lawyer for AG's office to arrive, she didn't immediately turn around when she heard a familiar voice from behind the partition that divided the waiting area from the tables. Instead she tried to place it, mentally scrolling through the likely candidates. The voice sounded familiar, but in an official capacity, which made sense, given the location near the courthouse. Not a friend, not someone she knew socially, someone she dealt with professionally – a lawyer most likely. She listened to the woman's voice more closely.

"I'm serious! She just blurts this out in front of the whole table! And then – this is the best part – she goes, 'well, he's _older_, but he's still cute.'"

Anita heard a man's laughter, and another familiar voice. "Wait, though. Did she say 'old' or 'old_er_?' It's an important distinction."

"Older." The woman replied. "She definitely said older."

"And you said…?"

"I was extremely diplomatic."

The man chuckled. "Well, this is all meaningless without attribution."

_Connie Rubirosa, _Anita suddenly thought, flipping open her cell phone to check for any missed calls. She heard Connie laugh along with her companion before speaking again.

"No! No, I can't give you names. It would be unethical."

"Names and I pay for breakfast." The man offered. He sounded more familiar now.

"Please – you're paying for breakfast anyway. Drag me out here at seven-thirty. We've barely even talked about the case."

Anita glanced up to see her colleague enter the diner, and she rose and glanced back to where the voices were coming from. _Mike Cutter. _That one she hadn't been able to guess and she knew why. She hadn't actually thought the man was capable of laughing. He _was_ capable of putting the fear of God into half her detectives (the other half, she assumed, just hadn't met him yet). She'd remembered seeing one detective, after a dressing down by the EADA, hang up the phone, looking ashen. Bernard, happening by, had patted the guy on the back and said what they all thought (what she had, so often in the past, also thought about McCoy): "Just be glad he's on our side, man."

She looked over at the table again, debating whether or not to say hello. She was now standing directly in Cutter's line of sight, but he didn't notice her. Nor was he looking at the bill he was holding in his hand. While Connie was busy looking through her purse for something, Cutter was looking at Connie, an unreadable expression on his face. Anita raised her eyebrows and moved to follow the waiter to her table.

*******

Connie had given him a very brief rundown of her conversation with Janice Dunlap over breakfast. On the short walk back to the office she went into more detail: how Janice had claimed that she was no longer sure of what she saw, how she thought that perhaps her perceptions had been influenced by her psychological state. Mike had snorted at this last one.

"And," Connie continued, "check out this visitor's log from Riker's." She handed him the file.

He studied it. "She's been visiting Cody Larson in jail."

Connie nodded. "Or, as he now prefers to be called, Sweetie."

She saw realization dawn in Mike's face. "She's obsessed with Sweetie Ness," he said, thwapping her on the arm with the file, "and now she knows Dale Marks was an imposter, she's changing her story to protect the real Sweetie."

By the time they reached Hogan Place, they'd worked out that Sweetie was actually a composite created by Kate Tenney. It was Mike who suggested that they go see Tenney right away. Connie required a detour by her desk first. She was happy to take a little extra time to prepare herself for meeting Tenney again. There was something about the woman that made her almost physically uncomfortable. Connie wanted a strategy, and time to agree with Mike on an approach. For the time being, Mike had returned to complaining about the fact that the evidence against Larson had been excluded.

They entered the elevators at Hogan Place and she was lost in thought when he spoke again. She heard the frustration in his voice.

"So have you already told Lupo that his legal tricks didn't pay off, or you want me to do it?"

"It was a reasonable gamble to take." Noticing him start to object to this, she added. "You thought so, too. He had good intentions, Mike. He didn't deliberately try to screw us over."

"Too bad we're going to need more than Lupo's good intentions to win this case." He glanced at her briefly. "Sorry. I know you like him."

Connie frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing. I don't mean…I just meant you get along with him." Another sidelong glance. "Unless…"

"No." She said firmly. "I don't date colleagues."

He surprised her by laughing. When she shot him a look, he quickly assumed a solemn expression. "Very professional of you, Ms. Rubirosa."

She found herself annoyed at the mock-seriousness in his voice. The annoyance increased still further when he leaned toward her and remarked, in a faux-conspiratorial tone, "I hear that kind of thing can get complicated."

"I'll take your word for it," she replied coldly, attempting to put an end to the discussion.

She succeeded. The elevator doors swished open, and he stood back to let her exit. She grabbed the files she needed off her desk, along with the copy of the possibly-late Sweetie Ness' _Little Whore_ she'd been reading. By the time they left the building again, the conversation, as far as she was concerned, was forgotten.


	3. Chapter 3

**Just a short one, this time. It's really the second part of a two-part Sweetie-related segment. Next chapter will be a full one.**

**In and around Sweetie (part two)**

Sometimes – most times – cross-examinations were easy. Not the actually-conducting-them part of it, necessarily, but the ease with which it was possible to go on the attack. Undermining someone's credibility, publicly questioning their honesty, their reliability, their morals…such things went against the social contract and certainly against the natural instincts of anyone raised to be "nice."_ You're not supposed to call someone a liar in public_, Connie Rubirosa thought as she sifted through background information one more time, _but still, most of them make it easy. _

Janice Dunlap, unfortunately, was not making it easy. Granted, like so many of the others, she was lying. Clearly lying. And like so many of the others, she was putting her own narrow interests – in this case her interest in Cody Larson – above the fact that someone else had been murdered. Above justice, as Mike had noted contemptuously while they made their way back to the office after meeting Janice in her hotel room.

But in spite of all this, more than little part of Connie felt sorry for Janice and her stubborn, stupid determination to cling the possibility of a romantic future with Cody Larson, in spite of what common sense must have been telling her. Connie knew Janice, because everyone knew a Janice. Connie's had been named Denise, and they'd attended the same high school in ninth and tenth grades until Denise had transferred out. Connie had still been carrying a few extra pounds left over from childhood. Not enough to be the target of anyone, but enough that the boys weren't exactly swarming around her locker. Denise had been thin. Thin, unattractive, unfashionable, and – possibly the worst sin in high school – needy. She'd craved acceptance and belonging, but didn't have the first clue how to go about getting it. It was a terrible combination with which to venture onto the adolescent savannah. Her fellow students, sensing weakness, had turned on her. The girls had alternately giggled at her and frozen her out; the boys had made fun of her. She had roamed the halls of the school during the lunch hour like a ghost. When she transferred to a different school at the end of tenth grade no one had noticed. A new favorite target was found.

Connie had always wondered what became of Denise. Whether she grew into herself the way Connie had done. Whether she put it all behind her, became stronger for it, or whether she'd stayed needy, inept, a little infuriating. Whether she'd ended up…well, like Janice.

She came out of her reverie and focused her attention on Mike, who was sitting next to her, at the table in his office. He had a copy of Janice's employment history in one hand, an old restraining order against Janice in the other, and a thoughtful expression on his face. Something about the look in his eyes resonated in Connie. She'd seen it before, long ago, directed at Denise. She knew Janice would have seen it before, not quite so long ago, directed at her. It was the look of someone plotting the attack, sizing her up for the most damaging way to stick the knife in. Yes, it was different this time. Of course it was different. This had to be done. This wasn't high school, this wasn't gratuitous, and a man was dead. It was different; it was the same. She decided to speak.

"Can I suggest something?"

He turned to her questioningly, eyebrows raised.

"You might want to think about not going in all-guns-blazing on Janice."

Mike glanced briefly at the restraining order again, then back at her. "Meaning?"

"You know the type, Mike. She's got this idea that she and Cody Larson are going to be together. She's lonely. She was probably the punchline of every joke in school. She'll have developed a coping mechanism against bullies. Trust me. You go full bore on her, she's going to shut down, and you won't get anywhere."

He considered this for a moment, then placed the papers he was holding on the desk and interlaced his fingers on the table. "And that's how you figure I'm planning to approach this?" He looked sincerely curious.

Connie cast her mind back to the other day, in Janice's hotel room, and to Mike's dismissive response when Janice had asked him if they weren't dropping the charges against her. ("Cody Larson killed a man. We're not going to let it go because he gave you a phony story and an autograph.") She looked closely at him, but his face was impassive, waiting for her response. She suddenly had the odd feeling she was being tested.

"Honestly? Everything you've said makes me think that's exactly how you're planning to go."

Whatever the test was, she'd pretty clearly failed it. He didn't answer her beyond a noncommittal "hmm" noise. Instead, he turned back to the documents on the table and began sorting through them, making notes on the pad of paper by his elbow. She waited politely for a response that never came, then shrugged and turned back to her own file. She was halfway through re-reading it when he spoke, without looking up.

"You don't have a very high opinion of me, do you?"

There was no accusation in the question. If anything, his tone was light, almost conversational. She was startled.

"Where are you getting that from?"

He turned to face her again. A stray lock of hair fell over his forehead, and he pushed it away.

"It's not just that you think I'm planning to push Janice on the stand," he said, and now the conversational tone was gone, replaced by a note of irritation, familiar yet unfamiliar. She'd heard him use it in court. She'd never heard him use it on her. "You know as well as I do that it's necessary to be harsh sometimes. It's probably necessary this time. It's not that. It's the fact that _you_ think I get a kick out of it." He held her gaze for a moment, and she felt distinctly uncomfortable and off-kilter. It occurred to her that this was probably how defense witnesses felt at their trials. Like a bug on a pin. Like he saw right through her. _His eyes are dark blue_, she thought, randomly. _I've never noticed that before._

Then the moment passed and he turned back to his work. His voice, when he spoke next, was quieter. "If I need to step in to her, I'll do it, Connie. There's more at stake here than Janice Dunlap's hurt feelings. But I don't get any pleasure out of it."

To her own surprise, Connie found herself unsure of how to reply, even though, as someone very definitely raised to be "nice," the appropriate reply was obvious. _I never thought that, Mike. Of course you don't enjoy it. I never meant to imply…_

But she couldn't say that. She couldn't say that because it wasn't true, was it? The truth – what she really should say, if she was still being honest – was much different. _You're brilliant, Mike. And you show just enough compassion to keep you on the right side of insufferable. But are you cruel? I'm sorry I offended you, but I needed to ask that, and I needed an answer. Because if you are, I don't see how I can continue to work with you. I don't see how I can be around you at all. _

"Thank you," she said simply. It wasn't "nice," but it was close to honest as she could comfortably get.

Any doubts she had that he wouldn't read between the lines were quickly answered, when he nodded and said, just a bit too casually, "I hope that helps."

_He's not offended,_ she thought, with amazement, and at the same time wondering why she should be shocked by this. _He's hurt._ She peered closer, noticing how tired he looked all of a sudden. The stray lock of hair had fallen forward again over his forehead and, without thinking, she reached over and gently brushed it aside.

He turned toward her, and there was a strange mix of surprise, suspicion, and vulnerability in his eyes. She smiled at him. "It helps," she said.

The suspicion melted away. He smiled back. Not the usual guarded smile she was so familiar with. This was something different. Something warm, real, a little shy. It touched his eyes. And, for that brief second or two, she felt her heart flutter.

_I'm glad you don't look at me like that very often, Mike, _she found herself thinking. _Because if you did, I'd be in trouble. I'd be in big, big trouble._

It was only a week later – after the trial, after Kate Tenney had stood inches from Mike and murmured, "you ever wanna party with somebody nice and tight, sugar daddy, you just give me a call," after Connie reluctantly identified the sudden gnawing sensation in the pit of her stomach as a twinge of jealousy – that she realized she was already in trouble.

She'd stayed quiet during the journey back to the office from that last meeting with Tenney. When he'd stopped by her desk, favored her with another one of those rare smiles and suggested they get a drink after work, she'd heard herself saying yes. Then she'd stared, unseeing, at her computer screen, listening to the rain from a late afternoon shower spatter off the window, alternately dreading the end of the work day and counting the minutes until it arrived.


	4. Chapter 4

**(In and around "Zero")**

_When it all unraveled_, she thought later, _it did so surprisingly quickly_. She supposed that this was the reason she felt so dejected – that she didn't anticipate the changes that would occur, that she hadn't been keeping her eyes on the road. Connie lived her life the way she drove her car: safely, prudently, always looking as far ahead as possible so as to avoid accidents. The fact that the unraveling itself was implicit, unspoken…well, that just served as an added layer of complication. When things changed, they couldn't even talk about it.

It had started with the Kate Tenney case. It was then that Connie decided to acknowledge to herself that her feelings towards Mike officially constituted a crush. A small, harmless office-crush. Not the end of the world, and for most people, not unheard of – even if it constituted a first for Connie. She'd always found him attractive, of course. Or, rather, she'd objectively recognized that he was attractive. But for the first eight months of their working relationship, she'd also found him extremely difficult to work with. Brilliant, but frustrating. And, if she was being perfectly honest with herself, a little intimidating. She worked hard at her job, and she also knew that she was generally considered, within the office grapevine, to be a high-flier – someone for whom great things beckoned. She wasn't used to feeling like a sidekick, dancing around the edges of the spotlight in yet another Mike Cutter production. It had been different with Jack. As ruthless as he could be in court, the now-DA had always let his humanity show through, particularly towards his colleagues, and much more readily than Mike. There was a kindness and a warmth to Jack that she had not easily seen in Mike. Maybe it was because Jack had been married before, she thought. Or maybe it was because he was a father.

By contrast, Mike seemed to be all about the job. Another colleague of hers, some young kid who had recently joined the office, had admiringly referred to Mike Cutter as a robot. Connie had smiled at this, but then had, on more than one occasion, suspected that Mike didn't so much sleep as occasionally plug himself into a wall for an hour to recharge.

As a result, it had taken a good eight months into their working relationship before she saw him as a human being, which was, come to think of it, a strange thing to think about a colleague. Eventually, though, she saw flashes of real emotion from him. She hadn't enjoyed seeing him so bothered by the case involving the disabled girl, Lacey Talbot, but it was evidence, at least, of compassion.

She supposed, too, that it wasn't just one-sided. As she had become more used to him, he had eventually become more comfortable with her, as well, and more willing to demonstrate that he had thoughts and opinions – feelings, even – around issues outside of the law. After they'd returned to the office from that last meeting with Kate Tenney, he'd suggested they get a drink and she'd found herself inexplicably anxious. She'd chided herself for it, and for her sudden inability to identify her own feelings. But when they did leave the office that evening, she'd enjoyed herself, and she'd enjoyed talking to him about her life, her family, and learning more about his. _Fine_, she told herself at the end of the evening, after she'd said goodbye to him and was waiting for the R train to arrive at the City Hall stop. _It's a little work-crush. Everybody gets them from time to time. We spend a lot of time together. It's natural. It'll fade soon enough._

And so she had been able to continue the day-to-day activities of her work, relatively unconcerned. A few days later, they'd gone out again, and he'd carefully explained the infield-fly rule while they were sitting up at the bar, sipping their drinks (drinks that, she noticed, now seemed to happen just because, rather than as a way to celebrate or commiserate at the end of a tough case). She'd claimed that she found the rules of baseball too complicated, and he'd done his best to persuade her otherwise, using the infield-fly rule as an example of one of those apparently convoluted baseball laws that was (so he informed her) actually straightforward. He'd scribbled on a cocktail napkin as he spoke, his eyes lighting up while she leaned and peered at the diagram, charmed by his enthusiasm, her head close to his.

For her part, she was proud of the fact that she'd managed to get him hooked on the terrible reality show she'd fallen into the habit of watching while she cleaned her apartment on Sunday mornings. She'd dared him to watch it, and he'd shrugged and come back into the office the following Monday claiming to have "dropped fifty IQ points" as a result. And yet, the following weekend, as she'd been dusting her coffee table and staring in horrified fascination at the TV, her Blackberry had chirped with a message, and she'd looked at it to find that he'd sent her a message. _("Are you watching this? Why is that woman orange?"_)

She smiled and tapped out a quick reply (_"Self-tanner and a lack of restraint"_) before bending down to sort through the pile of take-out menus that had nested on the shelf underneath the table. It occurred to her as she did so, that she no longer pictured Mike spending his weekends in a suit and tie and staring at a pile of legal briefs or rehearsing summations. She had another picture now: Mike stretched out on a couch somewhere, watching bad TV, Blackberry in hand, reading her reply. At some point, she realized, he became real to her.

Nonetheless, when Carly entered the picture, Connie was unprepared for how it would affect her. Mike may have become real to her, she realized, but not in all aspects. She knew, intellectually, that part of his non-work life would have included women. She remembered once overhearing Ida, who served (officially) as Jack's assistant and (unofficially) as the office matchmaker, ask Mike if he was seeing anyone. Connie had heard Mike's reply (an offhanded, "nothing serious") and read between the lines quite easily. _Commitment-phobe_, she'd thought dismissively, before turning back to her work. So when she first met Carly, and Jack had smirked about Mike and Carly's "scheduling issues," she'd called to mind Mike's response to Ida and suspected that she could now put at least one face to Mike's definition of "nothing serious."

What she didn't expect, however, was the surge of discomfort she felt as Mike opened the door for Carly and walked with her down the hall. Primarily, she told herself, she was concerned about a possible conflict of interest. If Mike had some sort of relationship with this woman it could cause problems in the case. It certainly explained the instinctive disquiet that had accompanied Carly's arrival.

She was still toying with various different options on how to approach the issue as they walked over to Judge Reynolds' chambers for a motion hearing. She watched Carly carefully, and Mike even more so. Something was going on, she decided, and she needed to speak up. She waited until Mason's lawyer, Estelle Adams, had left them in the hallway, before turning to face him. She smiled, feeling a little awkward, trying to be light-hearted.

He frowned at her. "What?"

"So you and the judge's clerk. You two are…?"

He'd looked taken aback. "Friends," he supplied.

"Friends," she echoed. He'd answered hastily. Too hastily. "So we don't have a conflict of interest problem, do we?"

A look of amusement crossed his face. As usual, Mike recovered quickly from being caught off-guard. "No," he answered. "And we don't have a jealousy problem, do we?"

Connie suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. "I was in preschool when you started to work here, remember?" She turned and moved away towards the elevators. His voice followed her.

"That was Estelle Adams, not me!"

She raised one hand in a wave, without looking back. She could hear his steps behind her a moment or two later, and he caught up to her just as the elevator arrived. When he reached past her to push the button to the lobby, he favored her with her a slightly concerned look, no doubt worried that he'd offended her. She stared straight ahead, pressing her lips together to keep from laughing. He looked more closely at her, realizing what she was doing. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him shaking his head.

"Cheap shot, Connie."

She glanced at him. A slight smirk was tugging at the corner of his mouth. She felt a momentary sense of relief that he was so thick-skinned, so willing to let himself be teased by her. He had his faults; over-sensitivity wasn't one of them. "You asked for that," she informed him with a grin.

"Fair enough," he admitted. The elevator came to a halt and the doors opened. A group of people waited in the lobby to get on, and he guided her through the crowd, his hand gently and briefly resting on the small of her back. It occurred to her later that she minded that a lot less than she should have. In fact, it occurred to her later that she didn't mind it at all.

***************

Unfortunately, Carly's involvement in the case had continued to cause problems, legally and otherwise. Connie sensed that she had not been given the full story of the relationship between Mike and Carly, in spite of his declaration that they were friends and nothing more. Of course, she could hardly ask him about it again. She could only watch as Carly's obvious interference with the trial led Mike to try and get Judge Reynolds removed from the bench.

The other thing she could do, apparently, was find herself reduced to sniping at Mike over the situation. When he'd sat down at her desk, shortly after Reynolds had reversed his ruling on a motion to exclude some of the evidence, she'd snappishly asked him if he'd stayed behind to hash things out with his "friend," putting the kind of emphasis on the word that made it clear she had doubts about the accuracy of the label. Later on, she'd asked him whether his desire to expose Carly's actions had less to do with justice and more to do with salvaging his male pride.

It was petty, it was childish, and it wasn't her. Afterwards, she felt thoroughly embarrassed by it even though, in the end, everything sorted itself out. If anything, it was _because_ everything had sorted itself out that she was forced to look back, see her behavior as both unnecessary and unprofessional, and cringe.

She thought carefully about it in the days following the collapse of the case, the removal of Judge Reynolds, and Carly's looming investigation by the AG. The problem, she decided, was that she and Mike had been spending entirely too much time together. Lunches together were more regular, so were drinks after work, and non-work-related text messages on the weekend were no longer unheard of. Not, she reminded herself, that he'd made anything approaching a move on her.

Still, she saw it for what it was. She was the first to admit that she worked hard, but she found time to see friends, take in the occasional movie, drag herself to the yoga studio that was down the block from her apartment. What she had not had the time for, in far too long, was dating. The thought of exchanging life histories at a generic downtown wine bar, trotting out the same anecdotes, making the same small-talk, only to find out, invariably, that there was no compatibility…It was exhausting.

And then there was Mike. They spent time together, had already exchanged a fair few life stories, and shared a mutual loathing of both downtown wine bars and small talk. She sensed – was pretty certain, actually – that he was attracted to her. And it had allowed her to get lazy, to enjoy the company of an attractive, successful man without having to expend the effort – or, okay, take the risk – of beginning a relationship. She liked him; she was attracted to him, too. And the fact that he was her boss, that it could never lead anywhere, made it safe, and it made it easier to avoid confronting the fact that time spent him was the closest thing she'd had to a date in months. Maybe that was understandable, she thought, but that didn't make it healthy. In any case, the longer things carried on as they were, the more blurred their professional relationship had become, the less safe it was. The Carly thing had highlighted this beyond any doubt. It was a crutch, she concluded, and it was time to stand on her own two feet.

She came to that conclusion while sitting at her desk, late one Friday afternoon, chewing thoughtfully on a piece of licorice she'd retrieved from the supply in her desk drawer. Jack had his scotch, she had her Twizzlers. She typed a few more sentences in the affidavit she'd been preparing, reaching down absent-mindedly to extract another piece of candy. The sudden buzzing of her Blackberry against the wood of her desk (she'd left it on vibrate after being in court earlier) made her jump. She reached for it. Mike. Of course. She opened the message and startled the person at the photocopier by laughing out loud.

"_That's the fourth one of those you've eaten in the last half-hour. You need help."_

She glanced up. The door to Mike's office was closed, but she had a clear view through the windows that separated his office from the outer area where she worked. Jack was seated across from him, at the table, and the two appeared to be deep in conversation. The only evidence that he'd sent her a message at all was the Blackberry he was holding in his right hand.

She pondered a moment and began to type. _"It's the fifth piece, actually. I'm down to half a pack a day. No intervention required."_ She pressed 'send' and watched as he glanced down at the Blackberry, nodding at something Jack was saying, reading her message with the trace of a smile on his face. His reply came through a moment later.

"_You're in denial, Rubirosa. It's not healthy."_

Her own smile flickered on her face, as it occurred to her how well, and how unwittingly, he'd just expressed her conclusions about something else entirely. _You don't know the half of it, buddy_, she felt like responding. Instead, she heaved a sigh, suddenly remembering her promise to herself, feeling weighted down by her new insight.

Her Blackberry buzzed again. _"Drink later?" _

The next step became suddenly clear. She took a deep breath and typed out her reply. _"Can't. Sorry."_

His reply was quick. _"You sure?"_

She paused for a long time. Then she picked up her Blackberry and slowly began to type. _"No go. I have a date."_

She never knew what possessed her to turn around and look into his office again. She didn't know what she was expecting to see. Something, perhaps, that would salve her conscience, and make her feel like less like the kind of person who would abruptly pull away and shut someone out. Whatever her motivation, she was unable to look away as his hand moved to the Blackberry that was now on his desk. Jack was still speaking. She saw Mike's gaze shift from the DA to the screen. He glanced at it, quickly at first and then more carefully, for much longer than necessary, the faint smile on his face disappearing. She watched as he looked past Jack, studying the blank whiteboard as if it held some sort of answer, before slowly and deliberately placing the Blackberry back on his desk, farther away than it had been. She watched as he shifted slightly in his chair, focusing more keenly on Jack. And then she finally found she couldn't watch any more and turned back to her computer, feeling slightly sick.

*********

Fortunately, there were only a couple of hours left in the day. More unusually still, Connie only had a couple of hour's worth of work to get through before she could put it aside for the day. She plowed through the affidavit she was writing, chased up one of the new hires for their draft of a plea agreement, read it, chased up the same new hire to re-write it from scratch, and began her Friday afternoon ritual of arranging her documents and calendar in preparation for Monday morning.

Jack had long since left Mike's office. Mike had poked his head out of his door shortly thereafter to check that work on the plea agreement was underway. There was no mention of her earlier message. He'd met her eyes, and his demeanor had been pleasant, professional, but unmistakably different.

Connie packed the last of her weekend reading and research material into her briefcase and turned her computer off. She stood at her desk for a moment, trying to decide whether she should sneak away or say goodnight. Sneaking away was tempting. Give it the weekend, come back on Monday, and start afresh.

Instead, she walked over to Mike's door. He was standing at his whiteboard, pen in hand, shirt sleeves rolled up, apparently deep in thought. She knocked twice on the door frame to get his attention, and he turned towards her. She hesitated, suddenly unsure of what to say. He waited, expectantly. She felt a wave of loneliness overtake her. There was no date. She was headed to the subway, and then she would go home. She'd order in food, watch some TV, and set her alarm to wake up in time for her regular Saturday brunch date with Megan.

"I'm heading out now," she said, after a silence that stretched on for a little too long. "I just wanted to say good night."

He nodded. "See you on Monday."

She took a few steps into the room, and looked at the whiteboard, trying to decipher the arrows and scribbles that now decorated it. "I can stay for a bit longer, though, if you need me to."

He waved her off. "I'm nearly done here."

She stepped back, turned to leave, and was almost out the door when he spoke her name. She glanced over her shoulder.

He'd returned to the whiteboard and was scribbling on it again. "Have a good time tonight," he said. He sounded genuine; she felt an unfamiliar ache in her heart.

"Thanks, Mike."

She turned away, and walked down the hall to the elevator. Things would be better on Monday. She just needed some time. She had a feeling they both did.


	5. Chapter 5

**In and around "By Perjury" (part one)**

**(N.B. The stuff about Connie's sister being in an abusive relationship is canon. It came up briefly in a conversation with Jack in Season 17. Everything beyond that basic fact, though, is obviously the product of my own imagination.)**

A girlfriend of his, ostensibly joking but with an undertone of bitterness, had once accused Mike Cutter of living in his office. Mike, also semi-joking but with an undertone of genuine curiosity, had asked her what was wrong with that. She'd stared at him in amazement, and he'd filled the awkward silence by making some off-handed remark about saving money by selling his apartment and setting up a permanent cot in his office. It hadn't gone down too well, and the girlfriend had become an ex shortly thereafter.

Lately, though, if had occurred to him how true her observation had been. Since being promoted to EADA, he'd put in even longer hours, but over the past few weeks he'd left the office only to go home, try (and often fail) to sleep for a few hours, shower, change, and head back in to work.

It was partly the case he was working on right now. Marty Winston, besides being a murderer, lived up to every stereotype about litigation attorneys out there. He was oily, smug, and self-satisfied. When Winston had presented Mike and Connie with affidavits for them to sign refuting any connection the two of them might have to Pan World Airlines, he'd been merely amusing. When he'd followed it up with a comment about "earnest civil servants like you," he moved from amusing to infuriating. It was an odd thing to say, perhaps, but as a general rule, Mike had found that for himself, and for most of the other ADAs he knew, those on trial didn't usually elicit much emotion from those prosecuting them. Not that the crime wasn't abhorrent, not that the person who had committed it wasn't reprehensible, but they usually provoked more of a dispassionate revulsion that, among other things, allowed you to get on with your life outside the office without obsessing yourself into an early grave.

Every so often, though, one's distaste for the accused became less dispassionate and more personal. Mike had a feeling that he would have found Marty Winston insufferable under any circumstances. When he and Connie had left the room after their first meeting with Winston, Mike had turned the air blue with a string of invective that Connie had chosen (wisely, given Mike's mood) to ignore.

Connie. That was the other reason he'd spent so much time at work recently, ensuring that by the time he got home it was late enough, and he was tired enough, that all he had the strength to do was fall into bed. Until a short time ago, he would have said that everything was fine. More than fine, actually, particularly where Connie was concerned. He'd known it was a foolish, possibly even dangerous idea, but for the past few months he had allowed the strong physical attraction he had always felt for her to mingle with the personal admiration he held for her as a colleague. And from there it had evolved into something else entirely. Something that he'd sensed looming on the horizon as early as a year ago, when his irritation with himself over his total inability to stop checking out her legs had begun. Against his better judgment, he'd started falling for her.

Now, it seemed, it was necessary for him to re-exert some control over himself. For a time, it had seemed that something was growing between them – on both sides. They'd become reasonably close. She'd told him about herself, about her family, even something as personal as her concerns for her sister, who was in an abusive relationship. He'd told her about a cousin of his who'd been in the same predicament, and who had, in the end, gotten out. They'd started holding each other's gaze for just a little bit longer than strictly necessary. They had inside jokes. When they walked somewhere to get a drink or a bite to eat after work, her shoulder was usually brushing his. Things had changed between them.

And then they changed back. He wasn't entirely sure why that had happened, although he suspected that, just as he'd decided to allow himself to become more comfortable with what was apparently happening between them, she'd had the opposite reaction. She was still friendly and professional, as was he. But after a couple of attempts at asking her for lunch or for a drink and being politely turned down, Mike had stepped back, deciding that it was her turn to do the asking.

She didn't. And so it was that he found himself working all hours, in order to keep himself away from his apartment and a chance to be alone with his thoughts. His thoughts hadn't led him anywhere useful for the past few months, and he didn't particularly trust where they'd lead him now, other than to the bottom of a bottle of scotch. Of course, being at work meant being around Connie, but since there was no avoiding that, he decided that behaving in a purely professional manner would be the first step in the direction of having purely professional feelings. Feelings that would no longer leave him vaguely nauseous if, just as a for-instance, he learned that she was going out on a date. In the bright future he imagined, if he learned something like that, he wouldn't react by waving her off, leaving the office and going straight to a bar in his neighborhood, and then waking up late the next morning, hungover and still dejected.

Unfortunately, he thought, it was still a work a progress. Two steps forward, one step back. Today was a one-step-back kind of day. He'd been unable to keep his mind off her, even as he sat in his office reviewing the evidence against Marty Winston and Winston's motion to suppress that evidence. Whether it was because his own personal distaste for Winston was clouding his judgment, he couldn't say, but he was more than a little concerned that the evidence obtained by Lupo and Bernard from the Sheriff's Deputy wouldn't hold up at the motion hearing later that day. He silently cursed Lupo for another one of his attempted legal maneuverings and rubbed his temples in an attempt to stave off the headache that was coming on.

He looked up and directly out the window of his office in the direction of Connie's desk. She was bent over a file, reading it with a frown, and drumming her fingers on her desk. It was a chilly day outside, and the building management had, as usual, overcompensated by turning the heat up to sub-tropical. Connie had removed the gray jacket she'd been wearing to reveal a snug short-sleeved black sweater. The snugness of the sweater did little to keep Mike focused on his work. He briefly considered closing the blinds of his office to block her out, then chastised himself for his own lack of discipline. _Anyway,_ he thought, checking his watch, _Lupo'll be here in a minute for his prep before the hearing_. Although they'd discussed the motion hearing with Lupo already, he'd decided to allow an extra few minutes to speak with the detective before walking over to the courthouse. He had no real concerns about Lupo on the stand. He was experienced and generally unflappable, unlikely to be led astray by the defense's line of questioning. Bernard was still learning the ropes when it came to providing testimony and could be baited. Winston, for his part, was bound to identify and seize on any vulnerability. Lupo was definitely the better bet. Still, the legality of the way the evidence had been obtained was uncertain to say the least. Winston knew it, and would be waiting, knives drawn, for the detective to slip up.

Mike turned back to his computer, reviewing the winter vacation schedules that had been emailed to him for final approval and thinking that the headache of increased administrative duties was something he hadn't counted on when he'd exultantly accepted his promotion. He heard Lupo's voice in the hallway a few minutes later and looked up to see the detective perusing a piece of paper Connie had handed him. Time to leave. He took a deep breath, fortifying himself, before pushing his chair back, grabbing his coat and briefcase, and walking out to Connie's desk.

*****

The motion hearing had not gone well. Lupo hadn't messed up, exactly (or so Connie tried to argue as she and Mike headed back to the office), but his use of certain lawyerly turns of phrase had not escaped Winston for a second. As a result, Winston had, as Mike argued back at Connie, "landed on them like a sumo wrestler." Lupo's sheepish admission that he was attending law school had led to Winston arguing that the detective should therefore be held to a higher standard. This had, in turn, convinced the judge to throw out the evidence and give them three days to come up with something new.

Connie had thrown up her hands at Mike's sumo analogy. "The evidence was touch-and-go to begin with, Mike. It was probably going to get tossed anyway, regardless of what words Lupo used."

"And remind me – who obtained that evidence in the first place?" Mike inquired, pulling on his gloves and they exited into the cold December air. "Lupo fuc…" (she shot him a look) "Lupo _messed_ up, whatever way you want to look at it."

Connie sighed. "Look, I'm not happy about it, either, but there's nothing we can do now." She paused, and seemed to be trying to moderate her tone. "Just cut him a break, will you? He's more upset about it than we are."

"Yeah? Somehow I doubt that." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Connie shake her head, obviously unwilling to continue the conversation. Nonetheless, the part of his brain that apparently lived to push the envelope took over.

"Anyway," he continued, ignoring the other, sensible part of him that was strongly suggesting he leave well enough alone, "I should know better than to discuss this with Lupo's greatest defender."

_Yep_, he thought, watching her lips compress into a thin line,_ envelope definitely pushed. Bravo, Cutter._

"Actually," she said carefully, over-enunciating her words as if speaking to a small child, "what I'm trying to do is inject some balance into a conversation with Lupo's greatest detractor. _You_ have to work with them after this is all over, as you yourself reminded me when I had to play defense attorney that time. It was good advice, Mike. I suggest you follow it."

He shrugged, muttered something noncommittal and decided to let the matter drop, grudgingly admiring her counterargument. _Well played, Rubirosa._

*****

Three days later found both of them still sifting through ream after ream of documentation, searching for anything that could support an indictment against Winston. Connie had worked her way through enough packages of licorice in that time that she'd decided an early morning run in Prospect Park was in order. Lupo and Bernard had also come up empty so far, and Mike's sense of foreboding about the case had increased.

The morning of day three found him checking his Blackberry every few minutes and waiting for a message from Connie to let him know when Lupo and Bernard would be by with the final results. He glanced up at Connie, who was at her desk, reading something on her Blackberry, a piece of licorice dangling from her mouth like a limp, violently-colored cigarette.

Mike checked his watch, paced his office, and returned to the whiteboard, hoping that the dots of the case would somehow connect themselves within the next hour. When they didn't, he stepped out into the hall and walked towards her desk, on the off-chance that she had at least heard some promising news from Lupo and Bernard. She was on her office phone, talking animatedly, and as he turned away to give her some privacy, she waved at him, motioning for him to sit down.

He did so, just as she was hanging up. She turned towards him and handed him a piece of licorice, which he accepted bemusedly.

"Was that the cops?" he asked.

She blinked at him. "No. No, they'll be here in a few minutes." Her expression momentarily clouded. "I don't think they've got good news, either."

Mike nodded resignedly. It was just as he'd thought. He looked up and peered closely at her. She had an expression of barely contained glee on her face that was at odds with the Winston situation.

"What?" he inquired.

Connie beamed at him. It was the first real smile she directed at him in several weeks and he hated himself a little bit for feeling like the sun had suddenly shone down on him.

"She's leaving him."

Mike frowned. "Who is?"

"My sister. She just phoned me now. She's decided to leave him. Not only that, she's thinking of moving to New York. She's going to try and set up some interviews and fly out here in a few weeks. You know…to 'visit' me."

"Has she told him yet?"

"No. No, she's going to be careful about getting everything set up ahead of time so she can just leave him a note." A nervous expression crossed her face briefly.

Mike nodded, suppressing a flicker of concern and returning her smile with a grin of his own. He held up the piece of licorice she given him. "Here's to new beginnings, then."

She tapped his licorice with hers and took a bite. "To new beginnings."

He placed an elbow on the edge of her desk and rested his chin on his hand, gazing fondly at her. "Let me know if there's anything I can do to help."

It seemed to trigger something. Her smile faltered, and she looked away suddenly, shifting uncomfortably in her chair.

"You know what? I think it's all under control." The excitement had gone from her voice. In its place was the pleasant-but-bland monotone that had become so familiar over the past several weeks. "Thanks, though."

Mike removed his elbow from her desk, sat back in the chair, and sighed. _Enough_, he thought. _Enough._

"Connie…" he glanced around quickly, checking that no one else was within earshot. He didn't miss the cornered expression that appeared on her face, but decided to press ahead anyway. "If I've said or done something to upset you, I wish you'd tell me what it was so we can deal with it."

She turned away and focused on the computer screen in front of her, apparently finding something on it that commanded all of her attention.

"There's nothing, Mike. Work's just a bit stressful right now. You know how it is."

He was caught off-guard by the flash of annoyance her response sparked, and took a few seconds to gather himself before speaking again. "Fine," he said, aware that his tone of voice had sharpened and not really caring all that much. "You don't want to discuss it? That's your call. But do me a favor? Don't insult my intelligence by implying that this all in my head."

She stopped typing and closed her eyes briefly, leaning forward on her desk and resting her forehead on her hand. Finally she turned back to him. He sensed that she was steeling herself for whatever she was about to say, and he waited, eyebrows raised politely.

"It's just…" she paused, and he could almost see the wheels turning as she worked out how to phrase whatever was coming next. She spoke cautiously, almost formally.

"I've recently become…_uncomfortable_….with the extent to which my work life is intruding on my personal time. I feel like I haven't been striking a healthy balance between them."

_Oh. _He nodded, but didn't trust himself to speak.

"Mike?" She sounded hesitant.

He considered her briefly, then stared straight ahead, through the window that separated his office from the outside. "And by 'work life' I assume you mean me," he said flatly.

She made a small, helpless gesture. "It's not that simple."

Mike nodded again. "Right." He looked at his hands for a moment, and then back in front of him. "I get it."

She opened her mouth to speak, but he stood up abruptly, cutting her off. She tried again, anyway.

"Mike? Are you okay?"

He turned towards her finally, smiling, and she winced involuntarily. It wasn't the smile she'd become used to from him, although she'd seen it before, directed at witnesses and defense attorneys. It was his mild, dangerously pleasant smile. His _screw you; you are dismissed_ smile. It might have worked on her, too, if she hadn't known him well enough to notice the hurt in his eyes.

"Of course I'm okay. I'm fine." He glanced down the hall and then back at her. The smile had vanished. "Lupo and Bernard are here."

As it turned out, Connie thought afterwards, Mike was far from fine. Within the space of a minute, he'd torn a strip off Lupo for "playing lawyer" on the stand. A half an hour after _that_, he'd received a contempt citation. Then, later that same day, she'd left him in his office with Jack, who had come into the room carrying a piece of paper and ominously asking Connie to excuse them. When Jack left the room a few moments later, she turned to see Mike walk back to his desk, sit down, and stare into space. He looked miserable.

She had sudden, overwhelming urge to go to him. She saw herself shutting the door, calmly closing the blinds to his office, grabbing him by the tie, and kissing him. She saw him kissing her back, and she wondered, not for the first time, what that would be like. Then she turned in her seat and resolutely faced her computer. When she turned back, he was up and pacing, tapping away on his Blackberry and glancing occasionally at the whiteboard and his scrawls about the Winston case. He no longer looked miserable; he looked focused. She nodded to herself. There was work to be done.


	6. Chapter 6

**I hadn't updated this for a little while, but this chapter is significantly longer than the others, so…uh…there you go.**

**By Perjury (part two)**

Although Connie wouldn't have thought it possible when the charges against Marty Winston were dismissed – with prejudice – the case continued to get worse, even when they ostensibly "won." Mike had apparently bounced back from both his conversation with Connie and his apparently equally-painful discussion with Jack, but he had done so in his own way which, Connie was not surprised to notice, involved focusing single-mindedly on bringing Winston down.

They'd been walking back from their visit with the US Attorney when the idea had apparently struck him. He'd wandered over to a magazine kiosk and looked back at her.

"If I smoked," he asked her, in a familiar tone of voice that meant he didn't expect an answer, "what would I smoke?"

Connie had frowned at this, watching as he tossed a pack of cigarettes on the counter and counted out some money. She waited patiently, shifting from one foot to the other in the January cold. Mike unwrapped the plastic from the top of the pack and removed the foil, drawing out a cigarette and striking a match. She stared at him, knowing he was waiting for her to ask him what he was doing, and determined not to give him the satisfaction.

He took a long drag, peered at the lit end of the cigarette, and exhaled a fine stream of smoke. "Won't look as convincing if I open a fresh pack in front of him," he informed her.

She refused to take the bait, and raised her eyebrows at him instead.

He took another drag. "Did you know these things are ten bucks a pop now?"

"No." She waited a bit longer, then rolled her eyes and decided to cave in. "Won't look as convincing if you open a fresh pack in front of whom?"

"Winston." Mike took another drag and blew a perfect smoke ring into the brisk winter air. "Still got it," he remarked, more to himself than her. Then he smiled, slightly abashed. "I smoked all through college. And…most of law school."

"Uh-huh." Connie was unimpressed, and the cold was now biting. She began to move gently in the direction of Hogan Place, hoping to draw him along with her. It worked. "What does Winston have to do with it?"

He explained it to her as they walked back to the office, finishing the cigarette and then flicking it with practiced ease into one of the large ashtrays that had been set up, away from the building, in order to dissuade smokers from clustering immediately outside the doors. Connie noted the unconscious familiarity with which he did so. Her own father had quit smoking when she was ten. He had briefly picked up the habit again (very briefly; Connie's mother had soon found out and hit the roof). She remembered it being the same for him. Her father hadn't smoked in nearly twenty-five years, but when he'd lit up again for the first time, he'd told her that it was like he'd never quit – the motions, the ritual (tapping the butt of the cigarette against the pack, running it under his nose to catch the scent, flicking the lighter, the drawing in and breathing out) were still so ingrained, he could perform them almost naturally.

She stayed quiet when Mike told her the plan, asking him for a little time to think about it. He shrugged, and she had a feeling that he'd probably proceed, regardless of what she thought about it. Still, it wasn't the worst idea in the world. It could work; it was pretty clever, actually. More to the point, they had nothing to lose by trying. When she poked her head into his office, half an hour later, he was on the phone. She caught his attention, made a smoking gesture with her fingers, and gave him the thumbs-up sign. He appeared at her desk a few minutes later.

"So you're on board?" he asked.

She nodded. "One condition? Get Jack's okay on it, before we actually take it further."

He dropped a wink at her. "Well, that goes without saying."

A few minutes later he passed by her desk, coat on, briefcase in hand. He waggled the pack of cigarettes at her as he went by.

"Wish me luck."

Connie squelched her inclination to grin at him, and gave him a small wave instead. Mike could be reckless. Not only reckless. When he'd zeroed in on someone like this, he was a little bit scary. _It's like being on a rollercoaster ride_, she thought. _Or maybe in a speeding car that's out of control and heading towards a wall. _It made her nervous, and not just because he was her colleague and would therefore be involving her in any professional messes he made. It made her nervous because she was still attracted to him.

She'd never understood, and had even (as much as she hated to admit it) looked down her nose at women who continued to be attracted to the Wrong Type of Man after the age of oh, say, eighteen. Connie had never been prey to that. She'd dated nice, polite boys from nice, polite families who took her on nice, polite dates. Occasionally those dates had turned into nice, polite, drama-free and highly functional relationships that, for various reasons, hadn't worked out (often because the nice, polite boy couldn't reconcile the possibility of having a nice, polite wife who worked with cops and criminals, and who knew her way around Riker's Island). Mike was many things, and could do a passing imitation of both nice and polite when the situation called for it, but he certainly wasn't "safe" in the sense that she was used to.

Not that he necessarily shared that view, of course. She remembered once jokingly referring to him as a rebel with a cause, and he'd snorted. ("I'm a forty-four year-old lawyer, Connie," he'd pointed out, "I'm as conventional as you get.") She'd quietly disagreed.

As it turned out, and as Mike had calculated, Marty Winston had let Mike smoke in his office. Mike had returned an hour or so later and sat down by her desk with a triumphant smile. She waved a hand near her nose.

"I take it you were successful."

"Is it that obvious?" He took a small sip from the cup of coffee he'd brought in with him from the cart outside and made a face.

"Yes. You smell like an ashtray."

He lifted the lapel of his coat to his nose and sniffed it. "Sorry. I had another one on the way back."

She nodded knowingly. "And so it begins again."

Mike looked a little aghast at this. "You're right." He fished in the pocket of his coat and handed her the pack of cigarettes. "Take these from me, would you?"

She sighed, took the pack, and bent it sharply, breaking the remaining cigarettes inside. Mike winced, then stood up and suggested – glancing mournfully at the disabled pack of smokes – that they speak to Jack.

Jack had been surprisingly easy to persuade. Connie sensed that the setup appealed to Jack McCoy, the EADA who still, palpably, missed the courtroom, even if Jack McCoy the District Attorney was probably inclined to think better of it. If Mike's disbelieving half-smile (as McCoy politely shut the door in his face) was anything to go by, he was caught off-guard by the relative painlessness of the conversation. Connie, on the other hand, was less shocked. There was a gleam in Jack's eye that she recognized from when she'd second-chaired for him. Jack wanted to take Winston down as much as Mike did.

And they had. Mike had successfully argued that the People had a viable case and the judge denied the motion to dismiss the charges. And then, with somewhat less subtlety, Winston had nearly taken Mike down.

Until then, it had all seemed to go according to plan, even though the prospect of this next phase had discomfited her slightly. Mike, it soon became clear to her, was not content with merely bringing charges against Winston. She'd made a half-hearted attempt to get him to drop it, to not "suggest" to Mrs. Cruz that she file a complaint to the grievance committee, at least not just yet, but he wouldn't hear it. Winston was in his sights. Marty Winston had got the better of Mike Cutter, and Marty Winston would pay. It was as simple as that. Mike wanted payback, and he wouldn't stop until he got it.

And so he moved quickly. A day later, the grievance committee met and had ruled against Winston, disqualifying him from representing the Pan World plaintiffs and from receiving any compensation. Winston went pale. He stalked out of the room, yelling at the committee, at the cops, and at Connie and Mike. Lupo and Bernard shifted uncomfortably in their seats. The members of the grievance committee looked awkward. Then she'd glanced at Mike. Like the others, he was watching Winston, but there was no discomfort, no awkwardness. Rather, there was a slight smile on his face, and his eyes were cold. _Gotcha! _the look said. It unnerved Connie far more than Winston's raging ever could.

As they exited the room, Mike had headed towards the washroom, telling her he'd meet her downstairs. Connie turned and walked to the staircase, her heels clicking on the marble floor. She was vaguely aware that Bernard and Lupo had also lingered. A snatch of conversation floated down to her, echoing off the floor and walls.

"Are you happy now?" she heard Winston ask. "My money. You went after my money. It had nothing to do with the case."

Mike's reply drifted down to her as she descended the stairs, as cold as his eyes had been earlier. "Don't worry about the money, Mr. Winston," she heard him say. "I'll send you a hundred dollars on your birthday. You can use it in the prison canteen."

She moved out of earshot then, arriving from the second to the first floor and heading towards the exit. It was then that she heard the noise – a single, sharp popping sound coming from above. Connie paused. About thirty seconds passed, with no other sound following. She decided that it must have been a car backfiring (_From above?_ a voice in her head asked, skeptically. _Where is this car, the sixth floor?_). Still, she suddenly and inexplicably felt "off," as if there had been a change in air pressure.

It was then that a security guard rushed past her. She spun around to follow him before feeling someone else grab her elbow. It was another guard.

"We need to evacuate the building, ma'am," he informed her, polite but clearly brooking no argument.

"What happened?" Connie craned her neck, trying to see around the staircase she'd just descended.

"A shot was fired on the second floor." The grip on her elbow tightened slightly as he herded her towards the exit, through which other people in the building were now flowing. "Now, please, ma'am."

"But my colleagues…" she managed, before clearing her throat and finding her voice again. "My colleagues are up there."

The guard sighed. "I understand that ma'am. I'm sure they'll be down in a minute."

Connie surprised herself by meekly allowing him to maneuver her through the doors and onto the front steps. She sat down on a ledge at the base of the steps, near the sidewalk and waited. They'd be down in a minute. That was what the guard had said. She repeated it to herself, and kept repeating it, even as she heard the sound of sirens getting closer and even as a police car pulled up in front of the building and two officers rushed inside. In a minute. Down in a minute.

Five minutes passed, then ten. She began to pace, looking for a familiar face among the throngs of people who were streaming out the doors. Finally she saw one. Two, in fact: Bernard roughly pushing a handcuffed Marty Winston through the doors.

She pushed through the people in her way and over to them. "What happened?"

Bernard turned towards the sound of her voice, not recognizing it at first, opening his mouth to give a curious bystander the usual, curt everything's-under-control-ma'am, let-us-do-our-job. Then he saw her, and paused.

"Our friend here decided to take a shot at Cutter," he told her, using one arm to move through the crowd, the other holding onto Winston firmly. Winston said nothing. He looked dazed, defeated.

"A shot…" Connie repeated.

"Don't worry, he missed." Bernard gave Winston another rough shove in the direction of the patrol car. "Didn't you, Marty?"

Winston turned his zombie-like gaze onto Connie. She stared back at him, at a loss for words. The two of them moved past her, Bernard calling out over his shoulder something about "Cutter and Lupes" being "down in a minute." Connie abruptly decided that if she never heard the phrase "in a minute" again, it would be too soon.

This time, however, it was true. She looked up to see Lupo and Mike exit the building. Lupo saw her, said something to Mike and indicated Connie with a nod of his head. She approached them carefully, noticing that Mike looked as dazed as Winston had. Lupo moved off, saying something about getting a statement later. Mike nodded, then turned to face her.

She looked him over. "Bernard said Winston took a shot at you."

"Yeah." His voice sounded uncharacteristically dull. She waited to see if he'd keep speaking, and when he didn't, she decided to press him. Never mind that they were standing in the middle of the staircase with inquisitive onlookers milling about.

"A literal shot," she clarified. "With a gun."

"A literal gun, yeah," he confirmed. "I have Lupo and Bernard to thank for ruining his plans."

"Are you okay?" She realized it was a stupid question almost as soon as the words left her mouth, and it obviously struck him the same way, because he laughed dryly.

"I'm fine. I'll be fine."

"Those are two different things," she pointed out gently, stepping a bit closer to him and trying to catch his eye.

Mike shot her an impatient look, and stepped back. "Then excuse my lack of precision." He said it a trifle brusquely, and she was sharply reminded of the backdrop of the situation – the formality that had characterized their interactions for several weeks now.

On the other hand, she'd never been the type of person to back down. They needed to get in a cab, and they needed to go…somewhere. Back to the office, she supposed. Even better – back to Jack's supply of whisky. She moved to stand beside him, and slipped her arm through his, calculating that since he was carrying his briefcase on that side, it wouldn't be as easy for him to shrug free. It was cold outside, and she could feel the contrasting warmth of him against her, even through his coat and hers. He was there, he was unhurt.

She tugged him down the steps and towards the street, walking almost flush beside him, deciding to worry about the unnecessary physical contact later. These were, after all, unusual circumstances. She hailed a cab, instructed the cabbie to take them to Hogan Place, and looked over at him cautiously.

He'd settled into his seat was gazing out the window, at the heavy traffic outside, at the restaurant delivery guys weaving through traffic on their elderly bicycles, at the streams of people snaking an uneven path through intersections where cars had been caught out by the red light and ended up blocking the crosswalks. The cab moved onto Church Street, inching its way past Vesey.

Connie found herself transfixed by the video screen in the back of the cab, where Regis and Kelly were chirpily extolling the virtues of the new taxi-based entertainment ("Taxis sure are fun now, aren't they Reeg?"). She abruptly leaned forward and muted the sound, vaguely wondering how many cabbies would eventually be driven insane by the repetitive loop of chatter emanating from the backseat for hours a day. Mike glanced at the screen, then up at her. She gazed back, wordlessly.

He sighed. "Can you stop with the big eyes, Connie? I'm fine. Winston missed."

She considered this for a moment. Then, without knowing why, she asked, "How much?"

Mike frowned. "How much what?"

"How much did he miss by?"

She could sense that he was taken aback by the question.

"I don't know, Connie. Maybe a foot?"

"A foot," she echoed.

"Maybe a bit less, maybe more."

She nodded and then, with a start, realized that she was angry. More than angry, actually. Furious. She took a breath, hoping her anger would settle, realizing that it was already bubbling over.

"You couldn't let it go could you?" she observed. She spoke quietly, but she knew he could hear her. She wanted him to hear her. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see his head turn towards her, but she didn't meet his gaze.

"That money had nothing to do with the case. I heard Winston say that to you, and he was right. You wanted to teach him a lesson. You can't…" she paused for breath, trying to collect her thoughts and failing, continuing anyway, aware of the ever-increasing volume of her voice, equally aware that she was uncharacteristically ranting. "_Why_ can't you ever just leave well enough alone, Mike? _Why_ do you have to push and push and then something like this happens, because people snap. You drive them to the breaking point for no other reason than to watch them break, like you're immune to the consequences, and it nearly gets you killed. Why do you have to be so goddamn single-minded? You're like a dog with a bone. And what is _wrong_ with you that you don't know when to let go? And don't tell me it's because you couldn't see something like this coming, because you could. So why doesn't that hold you back?"

She stopped suddenly, out of words, the anger having evaporated as quickly as it arrived. A heavy silence settled in the cab. She could see the driver hunch down, pretending not to have heard any of this, nosiree, didn't hear a thing.

Mike was still. At least, she assumed he was. She didn't hear a sound from beside her. Not a sigh, not a dismissive laugh, and certainly not the offended counterargument she was expecting. Instead, he leaned forward, into the gap in the partition that separated the back of the cab from the driver's area.

"Could you pull over here, please?" he asked the driver calmly. "Keep the meter running."

The cab lurched to the corner. She heard the sound of the door beside her opening and turned, finally, in his direction. He was reaching into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, pulling out his wallet, not looking at her.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Walking."

He slammed the door, leaving a twenty dollar bill eddying gently onto the now-empty seat beside her. She followed his retreating figure through the late afternoon crowds, noting the way he was unconsciously patting himself down for cigarettes that were no longer there and hadn't been – with one day's exception – for probably twenty years. She met the embarrassed gaze of the driver in the rearview mirror.

"Keep driving?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, firmly. "Hogan Place." The office was only ten or so blocks away, and in this traffic it was hard to say whether or not he might get there before her. She mentally urged the driver to step on it. She had no desire to deal with Mike right now.

To her relief, the traffic cleared up, at least as much as it ever did downtown on a weekday. The cab pulled up at the building a few minutes later, and she paid the driver, stuffing Mike's twenty dollar bill in her coat pocket. Looking around as she stepped outside the cab, she was relieved to see no sign of him, and hoped fervently that he hadn't caught another cab and somehow already arrived ahead of her.

She made her way to her desk, still shaken. A quick glance at Mike's office confirmed what she'd expected – that he hadn't yet returned. She sighed with relief, and then walked to Jack's office to fill him in. Better he hear it from her than through the grapevine, which would no doubt be operating at lightning speed, the story getting more and more garbled with each telling, and reminding her of the inescapable fact that even the most educated workplaces resembled high school in more ways than she cared to dwell on.

******

All things considered, Jack took the news pretty well, although his eyebrows rose when she explained Mike's absence by telling him, unconvincingly, that Mike had decided to walk, while she'd taken a cab. He even patted her on the arm and suggested she take it easy for the rest of the afternoon. Connie smiled at him gratefully, and walked to the door. She'd already taken a step into the hall when he called out after her. She turned around and poked her head back in his office.

"Would you tell Mike to come and see me when he gets back?" he asked her, removing his reading glasses in order to see her more clearly.

She paused. "I'll leave a note on his desk."

"You won't be around?"

"I have some research to do. I think I'll head down to Archives for a couple of hours."

Jack studied her speculatively. "Looking to avoid the office rumor mill, I take it."

"Something like that."

Another long look followed this. Then – "Fair enough."

Jack picked up the reading glasses and returned to the most recent stack of paperwork that Ida had deposited on his desk. Connie crossed the area separating Jack's office from Mike's and knocked tentatively. Still no answer. Good.

She opened the door and entered, selecting a post-it note from his desk. _"Please see Jack asap,"_ she scribbled, checking her watch and adding the time, for good measure. Then, giving in to the small, petty voice that urged her on, she withdrew Mike's twenty dollar bill from her coat pocket, stuck the post-it to the money, and placed them both on his chair.

*******

Three hours later she was still downstairs, sifting through one of several old case files she'd pulled from the early 1990s. She longed for a glass of water, but the fussy little man who ran the Archives section as his own personal fiefdom (only sniffily and resentfully allowing actual lawyers access to the documentation) was firm about not letting liquids in, and had been holding her coffee mug, and its contraband water, hostage since she'd arrived.

Now the fussy little man was shifting in his seat and clearing his throat pointedly. Connie glanced at the clock on the wall above her, and was surprised to find that it was already seven o'clock – a fact that explained the throat clearing and the put-upon expression that was being sent her way. She began to gather her notes together and re-organize the files that she had been browsing, moving with deliberate slowness. Mike would no doubt have returned to the office, although whether he was still there, or whether Jack had sent him home, was anybody's guess. She hoped that Jack had fed him some whiskey, at the very least. Mike could probably use it, what with the events of the afternoon.

She felt the rising tide of guilt, which had been gnawing at her all afternoon, begin to overflow. Winston had tried to shoot Mike. Winston had very nearly succeeded. She couldn't imagine how upsetting it must have been. _And yet what did you do?_ she asked herself for what seemed to be the hundredth time, carefully placing a yellowing piece of documentation back in its original holder. _Were you sympathetic? Were you kind? Were you supportive? Or did you screech at him, imply that he had it coming, and drive him into the streets? _

She finished packing her notes, and returned the files to fussy man, who looked at them (and her) suspiciously, ostentatiously checking to see that all the files she'd signed out had been returned. She walked to the elevator and began to steel herself. _He might not be there_, she told herself. It didn't help. She'd have to acknowledge the egg on her face at some point. Better to get it over with.

The elevator doors opened on her floor and she stepped into the quiet corridor. There were still a few people working, but the lights were off over many of the desks, the computer screens blank. Jack's door was open, the room dark. From Mike's office, she could see lamplight. He was there. She took a deep breath and walked up to open door, not quite prepared to step over the threshold.

He was sitting at his table, a case file spread out in front of him, resting his head on his hand while he wrote. Her first thought was that he looked well. Surprisingly well. Her second thought, as she noticed the tumbler by his elbow, was to be grateful that Jack apparently had indeed fortified Mike with a glass or two of whiskey.

She knocked gently on the doorframe. Mike looked up, startled, before putting down his pen and sitting back in his chair, his features composing themselves into an expression that was equal parts exasperated and resigned. _ Now what?_

She knew she had this coming, but couldn't stop herself from wincing anyway. Right now she was clearly the last person he wanted to see. She took a half-step into the room, and he stood up from the table and walked behind his desk. _Putting more distance between us,_ she observed._ Distance and some furniture. _

She took another step into the room. "Hi," she offered.

He nodded.

"How are you?" she asked him, hoping to generate some sort of verbal response.

"Better, thanks." He lowered his gaze and began to sort through some of the papers on his desk. "Was there something you wanted?"

"Actually, yeah." She paused, unsure how to start. "I wanted to apologize for flying off the handle in the taxi. I didn't deal with it very well, and it was the last thing you needed. I feel awful about it."

He looked up, finally, from the papers he'd been perusing, and held her gaze for a long moment before speaking.

"Thank you," he said at last. He seemed to be deciding whether or not to say something else, then shook his head. "Let's just…move on."

"Okay," she said quietly. She thought that sounded a little less frosty than he had a few moments ago, but he was still far from warming up to her. "I was thinking…maybe I could buy you dinner. You know, as part of my penance."

Mike raised his eyebrows at this. "I'm not sure that's allowed."

She frowned at him, not understanding.

"Wouldn't that constitute your work life intruding on your personal time?" he inquired mildly, selecting a baseball from his desk and tossing it from hand to hand.

_Oh. _"No. Mike, I –"

"Because anytime you feel like explaining to me what _that_ was all about," he interrupted, "you should feel free, Connie. Really." He stopped tossing the ball and returned it to its usual place, before adding, "Anyway, I seem to have lost my appetite."

She suddenly felt as tired as he looked – certainly too tired to take a detour down this particular road.

"I get that you're not too fond of me right now," she told him. "I get that, and I don't blame you. So look, the dinner offer stands. I'm going to go around the corner to _Yello_. I'm going to sit up at the bar and have a glass of wine, and I'm going to take my time over it. If you change your mind about getting a bite to eat, you can find me there. If not, I understand, and I'll see you tomorrow."

She waited until he nodded and then walked out of his office towards her desk to gather her belongings and turn off the computer. _Yello_ – one of the many handy local haunts within stumbling distance of the D.A.'s office – was only a five minute walk away, and was a common destination for their after-work drinks (_or at leas, it used to be_, she reminded herself). Anyway, it was far too cold out to go further afield on foot.

She finished winding her scarf around her neck and pulling on her gloves. There had been no sound from Mike's office, no evidence that he was changing his mind and joining her. She tried not to be disappointed in that. _You were in the wrong_, she told herself, _you don't get to decide when you're forgiven._ She shrugged to herself and walked down the corridor to the elevators, already dreading the biting January wind the was waiting for her outside and equally dreading sitting at the bar by herself, making small talk with the bartender or trying to look engrossed enough in a book that she wouldn't be bothered by any of the other customers. Still, she'd told him she'd be there for a long glass of wine, and she felt obligated to tough it out for at least half and hour, forty-five minutes tops.

In the end, she only had to wait twenty. She'd made her way through half her glass of wine, and one chapter of the novel she had in her briefcase, when he slipped into the seat beside her. She carefully inserted a bookmark in her reading, closed it, and turned to look at him.

He was studying the drinks menu. "I found my appetite," he informed her, not looking up.

She smiled. "Where was it?"

"At the bottom of my third glass of whiskey."

The bartender arrived, and Mike ordered a club soda. She contemplated the rows of bottles along the mirror behind the bar. The varying shapes and sizes, the fact that – not being much of a drinker – she'd barely tried any of them and actively enjoyed only a few. For a minute neither of them said a word. Then, fixing her gaze firmly on her glass of wine, she decided to speak.

"It was Carly," she told him, surprised at how neutral she was able to keep her tone, how strong her voice sounded in her own ears.

She was aware that he turned towards her, but she remained fixed on her wine glass. Eventually he turned away again, facing the rows of bottles along the mirror.

"_What_ was Carly?" he asked.

"The past few weeks," she replied. "You're right. I owe you an explanation for that. It was Carly." _And please don't ask me to elaborate on it, because I'm not going to._

He ran his fingers along his glass, meditatively. "Carly and I weren't – " he began.

"I know."

"And we hadn't been – "

"I know."

He was silent then. She lifted her eyes from her wine glass, and met his in the mirror. He surprised her by breaking eye contact first, and looking down to swirl the ice cubes in his soda.

"Connie." He spoke quietly enough that she almost had to lean in to hear him. "What is this? What's happening between us?"

She considered this for a long while, wanting to be honest, finding herself unusually inarticulate.

"I don't know," she finally said. "I think maybe it's too early to say."

He nodded thoughtfully, still swirling the ice in his glass. The bartender drifted past, and Mike requested the bill.

"So where am I taking you to dinner?" he asked suddenly.

She turned to him in surprise. He was looking at her with that warm half-smile of his that she hadn't seen for several weeks.

"Shouldn't it be the other way 'round?" she queried.

He shrugged. "Next time."

"Deal." Connie drained the last of the wine from her glass and stood up. She reached for her purse, but he'd already dropped some bills on the bar to cover their drinks. He helped her into her coat, his hands resting on her shoulders briefly.

They left the bar and went to dinner. She walked close beside him on the way there, her shoulder brushing against his, and told herself it was because she was cold.


	7. Chapter 7

**In and around "Lucky Stiff" (part one)**

**N.B.** **The "boom-box" comment refers to the movie **_**Say Anything**_**. As for the Russian phrase…if you're so inclined, I'll just say that this is why the Good Lord invented google.**

When they prosecuted Stan Klein for the murder of Vladimir Rezanov (aka Vic Russell), Connie, at least, had felt more than a pang of sympathy for the Klein's family. They had all seemed genuinely horrified by the crime and, later, by Klein's apparent motivation – a murder to cover up a biofuel scam. Klein's wife had even failed to provide him with an alibi for the night of the murder. Most family members, whether because they assumed their loved one was innocent (often in spite of substantial evidence to the contrary), or because they simply didn't want to see said loved-one go to jail, were willing to lie about that kind of thing. Or, if not lie, at least stretch the truth. Connie understood it, even such lies routinely made her job more difficult as she sought to discover the contradictions and implausibilities that inevitably appeared. Mike, being Mike, had markedly less patience for this kind of thing. ("Just assume everybody's full of shit, Connie," he once told her, very early on in their working relationship. "It'll make the job a lot less frustrating.")

What she and Mike didn't know, and what they discovered later, was that one family member didn't deserve the sympathy that Connie, at least, had felt. Chad Klein, it turned out, was an apple that hadn't fallen far from the tree.

So, on the day of the verdict, in which the jury found the senior Klein guilty of conspiracy and murder, Connie wrongly considered that the case had been put to rest, at least until the sentencing hearing. Mike had evidently felt the same when, a few hours later and three-quarters of the way through the outstanding paperwork from the trial, he'd dropped his pen on the table where they were both sitting and looked at his watch. She was aware of him doing so, but was too busy sorting through the papers for the date of Klein's initial arraignment, which had temporarily slipped her mind. She only looked up when he pushed back his chair, stood, and informed her that he was calling it a day.

"Shouldn't we…," she began, indicating the documents spread out in front of her.

"They'll still be here tomorrow," he said, holding out a hand to her. "Come on, Connie. Let's go get that drink."

Connie took it, and he pulled her to her feet. Checking her own watch, she was surprised to find how late it had become. From far off down the corridor she could hear someone stridently arguing over the phone with someone else (a significant other, from the sounds of it) that being delayed at the office was "not my fault, it's Cutter's" and then – after evidently receiving an earful – peevishly accusing the person on the other end of the phone of "not appreciating what I do." Mike had smirked at this, and then begun gathering up the files from the table, organizing them neatly, before tossing them in a careless pile on his desk.

"Give me five minutes," she told him, before walking to her own desk and pulling a small make-up kit out of her drawer. She'd started this several months before (prior to The Carly Thing), this freshening up before going out for a drink with him, and she had told herself it was only polite to do so after a long day in the office when she'd run her hands through her hair so many times that (as her sister would say) she looked like she'd been dragged through a hedge backwards.

Over the past month or so – since things had improved between them following the Winston case – she'd admitted the truth to herself: that while she always liked to look presentable, she didn't spend nearly as long in front of the bathroom mirror before going out for a drink with any of her other colleagues, male or female. And, okay, she liked the way that he would quickly, but unmistakably, cast an appreciative glance her way when she reappeared at his office door, coat in hand. _We all need a little flattery from time to time_, she told herself. Besides, apart from one or two passing (and, she suspected, carefully off-the-cuff) comments, it wasn't as if Mike had actually _said_ anything about her looks. Nor was she the type of person who had ever craved comment on it. More than a few men had gone on at length about her appearance. Truth be told, she found it – and them – boring.

Still, when she tapped on Mike's doorframe a few minutes later, she couldn't help but feel a bit pleased when he turned from shrugging into his coat and looked her up and down briefly, a slight smile on his face. She smiled back at him and they left the building.

The place they ended up at was loud. He'd suggested somewhere farther away, but she'd insisted that it was too cold to walk far (rolling her eyes at him when he'd pointed out "all these yellow things called 'cabs' that'll take us places for a small fee"). So he'd given up and steered her towards a small bar a couple of blocks away, where they found a tall table with a couple of empty bar stools and sat down.

They made a toast to the successful case, he with a glass of scotch, her with a beer. The conversation had turned to other subjects, when Mike noticed that she was looking speculatively at her half-empty beer glass.

"Everything okay?"

Connie nodded. "I was just thinking…how often these cases turn on a dime. How often it's just sheer coincidence or outright luck that plays a part in it." She took a small sip of her beer and pondered for a moment. "Take Rezanov's watch…If it'd been another detective working the case, or if it'd just been Lupo there, no one would have figured out that the watch in Chad Klein's apartment was Rezanov's. But Bernard happened to know that what look like the letters 'BP' in English are actually 'VR' in Russian. He knew the Cyrillic equivalent and then made the connection, and almost anyone else would have missed it, because the characters for Rezanov's initials aren't, you know, _only_ found in Cyrillic."

"Right," Mike agreed, draining the last of his scotch. "And on the other hand, if our Russian victim had had the initials 'FD', even Lupo would've made the connection."

"Leave him alone," Connie responded, almost automatically. Relations between Mike and Lupo had also got significantly better since the blow-up during the Winston case (and since Lupo and Bernard had thwarted Winston's attack on Mike), but Mike still seemed not to be able to resist taking the occasional (now mostly good-natured) potshot. She suspected that, when he was out with Bernard, Lupo did exactly the same thing to Mike. "Anyway, why 'FD'?"

"Because those initials would be more obviously Russian," Mike explained. He removed the cocktail napkin from beneath his empty glass and reached into his inside jacket pocket for a pen.

"This is an 'F'," he told her, drawing what looked to Connie like a capital 'I' with a circle across the vertical line. "And this is a 'D'." Here he drew what looked like an oddly-shaped triangle, with a tiny line protruding from the bottom of each side. He pushed the napkin over to her, and Connie gazed at it and then him.

"Don't tell me you speak Russian, too," she said, lightly.

He shrugged. "A bit. I can get by, sort of. I _used_ to be able to get by. I'm a little rusty now."

She stared at him skeptically. "Say something then," she challenged.

"Like what?"

"Anything."

He thought for a moment, and then spoke a very brief phrase of what did, indeed, sound like Russian, a slight smile on his face. Despite herself, she was impressed, and asked him to repeat it. He did, speaking more slowly this time, and Connie listened closely, trying to remember it.

"_Ti takaya…" _she said, carefully, _"kra…krasi…"_

"_Krasivaya,"_ he finished.

"What does it mean?"

"It means I need another drink." Mike stood up, picked up his own glass, and indicated hers. "How 'bout you?"

"I'm still working on this one," she pointed out, thinking how strange it was to learn things about people you'd never suspected, particularly colleagues, about whose inner lives she seldom devoted much thought, but who often had random abilities or interests that seemed to come out of the blue. Like the time she'd first walked into Jack's office (back when Mike's office had been Jack's office), and found Jack happily tapping his fingers on his desk to The Clash. Other people didn't shock you in the least. Arthur Branch's fondness for going upstate to shoot ducks, for instance, hadn't exactly taken her by surprise.

She waited until Mike had returned with the drinks and settled back in his seat before she followed up. He looked a little unsteady, and she suppressed the urge to make a crack about how he couldn't hold his liquor. Or rather, how he'd get caught up with work, forget to eat, and then get tipsy off of one glass of scotch (a double scotch, in this case, but still.) She'd made such comments before and had found that they were usually unwelcome. Some male pride thing, she supposed.

"So how did you end up being able to 'get by' in Russian?" she inquired.

"My ex-fiancée's parents were Russian," he replied, casually. "She spoke it. I picked some up from her."

Connie nearly choked on the sip of beer she'd taken. "Ex-fiancée?"

"I was engaged once." He looked closely at her, a little confused. "I thought you knew that."

She shook her head. "What happened?" she asked, then instantly regretted it. Connie had always been a keen advocate of people minding their own business. She had to ask too many prying questions as part of her job – ironic, considering that she herself had a well-honed sense of privacy and tended to resent personal questions being asked of her. It was one of the hangovers of the job, she supposed, that her naturally watchful nature had become a little…over-developed. She even opened her mouth to retract the question, but Mike had apparently anticipated what she was about to say and held up a hand.

"It's fine," he told her. "Nobody got left at the altar or anything dramatic. It just didn't work out."

Connie's curiosity won out over her caution. "How come?"

Mike took a long pull on his scotch. "We agreed on all the big stuff. Careers, where to live…all of that. We were on the same page about definitely _not_ having kids, too. And then one day we…weren't." He shrugged. "It's nobody's fault, but it's not like you can compromise on that one, either. Someone changes their mind, and that's pretty much that. So we ended it. _I_ ended it."

Connie nodded knowingly. "She decided she wanted kids after all."

He blinked. "No. No, I did."

"_You_ did?"

He flashed a grin at her and nudged her gently with his foot. "And here I thought you were above crass gender stereotypes, Rubirosa. Shame on you."

She smiled back at him, a little weakly. "Where is she now?"

"Westchester. With her husband and their two kids."

"Ouch."

Mike shrugged, a little too nonchalant. "God has quite a sense of humor, doesn't he?" Then, apparently noticing her expression, he added, "It was fifteen years ago, Connie. Water under the bridge. I'd rather focus on the fact that we won this case." He finished his drink (more quickly than he had the last one, she noticed) and placed the glass back down on the table with a thunk. "Another one?"

Connie shook her head, wondering why she felt so unsettled.

Mike sighed patiently, shaking his head. "Connie, we lose too many close ones. I learned a long time ago to celebrate my victories."

She smirked at him. "Your victories?"

The slight grin on his face widened. "_Our_ victories," he said, leaning in toward her, his hand inches from hers on the tabletop, and close enough that she could smell the faint scent of his cologne. "Another beer?"

"Mmm." She nodded, wondering why she found herself acquiescing to him so often. Not that it hadn't always been that way. As he'd once told her, he was pretty good at arguing. He was also quite adept at turning on the charm when he needed to. Of course in the past, she reminded herself, she'd simply avoided the whole issue by not spending time with him outside the office – as if, deep down, she'd known that Mike Cutter's persuasiveness would eventually prove just as effective on her.

In the end, though, he'd only made it a foot or so from the table before her Blackberry chirped with a message, and Lupo gave her the news that both Stan Klein and his estranged wife had been found murdered in Klein's rented apartment. They'd hailed a cab and headed uptown to the crime scene, Mike sobering up with a cup of coffee he grabbed while they hunted down a taxi.

*******

The crime scene, as crime scenes tended to be, was horrific, chaotic. The bodies of Klein and his wife lay in the apartment. Mrs. Klein's daughter, hysterical despite the sedation that had been given to her earlier, was in the back of the ambulance, being comforted by Klein's son, Chad. As Mike and Connie walked up, the daughter, Alicia, informed the detectives that Stan Klein had been alive when she'd found them, and that he'd blamed the Russians.

Mike and Connie exchanged glances. Connie recalled Arshavin, the Russian mobster, stating in court that he would send Klein "a bill" for the money he now wouldn't be able to recover from Rezanov. The whole set-up seemed to make sense. On the other hand, there was something about it that struck her as a little ham-fisted, even for a mob hit.

She said as much to Mike as they left the scene. He mulled it over, thoughtfully.

"Maybe," he said at last, sounding doubtful. "But Klein's own step-daughter said he implicated the Russians."

"I know." Connie exhaled, watching as the steam of her breath vanished into the cold winter air. "Does Chad Klein seem a little 'off' to you?"

"Off?"

"I can't put my finger on it. Just…"

"A little detached?"

"Kind of, yeah." Connie yawned, suddenly thankful they hadn't stayed for that extra drink. She was craving her apartment, a cup of tea, and the soft new flannel pajamas she'd just bought. (_Because apparently I'm eight-five years old_, she thought ruefully. _And any day now I'll start collecting unicorn figurines and stray cats._) She looked up and down the street. A few taxis cruised past, their roof lights off, passenger seats full. "Where have all the empty cabs got to?"

"You'll have better luck on Broadway," Mike pointed out, gesturing vaguely ahead of him. They walked along in companionable silence for a block, Connie pulling down her hat and then wrapping her arms around herself against the cold. The height of the buildings created an unpleasant wind-tunnel effect that seemed to drop the temperature another ten degrees. Her sister, who was arriving the next day to begin her job search and the slow process of leaving her boyfriend, was sure to set up a volley of complaints about the cold. Connie smiled to herself. Elisabeth was bound to have packed at least five suitcases for the four-day visit, none of which would contain any of the items she'd actually need.

She noticed suddenly that she was walking alone, and glanced back to find Mike about fifteen feet back, peering in at the window of an electronics store, where a football game was being played out on one of the TVs. She trudged back to him.

"Hey," she said, waving a hand in front of his face. "Aren't you supposed to be walking me to a cab?"

He turned towards her. "Sorry, just checking the score."

"Nice. Very gallant."

He shot her a side-long grin and tore himself away from the game. "Connie, never let it be said that I don't know how to show a woman a good time. A few drinks, a crime scene…"

She snickered. "You're a ghoul, Michael Cutter."

"…all rounded off with a case of hypothermia. Very romantic." They reached Broadway, and as he'd predicted, he was able to hail a cab easily. He opened the door for her.

"So this is how you impress the ladies, is it?" she teased.

"You tell me."

There was something in his voice that caught her attention. She looked up from her purse, where she'd been carefully checking to make sure she had her wallet. The expression on his face was one she'd seen before on other men, but not on him. She'd had her suspicions, seen hints of it, sure – events that could be explained away, brief flashes so quick that if she'd blinked she'd have missed them, nothing she could pin down and say: _This. Unambiguously this_. But now there he was, standing close to her – not invading her space, not backing away, either. The cab door was between them, the look in his eyes was unapologetically flirtatious.

She held his gaze, and rocked one hand from side to side in a so-so gesture. "Not bad," she admitted. "Just don't stand outside my apartment with a boom-box."

He laughed, and the moment between them was broken. They exchanged good-nights, and Connie got into the cab, instructing the cabbie to take her to Park Slope and ignoring the embittered sighs of protest that a request for a destination outside Manhattan always seemed to provoke, especially at this time of night. She settled back in her seat, relieved to be out of the cold air, and more than ready to get home, make that cup of tea, and climb into bed. She closed her eyes briefly, wondering why she wasn't more surprised at the conclusion she'd just drawn, more disconcerted. A year ago, even a few months ago, she would never have so calmly accepted that something happening between her and Mike was no longer a question of _whether_ but _when._

And yet, several weeks later, she would be surprised at _how_ it happened. That the first time he kissed her wasn't the _denouement_ of some dramatic set of circumstances (for instance, of the sort that had happened only a few weeks before, courtesy of Marty Winston) or some passionate declaration. That instead they'd be talking about something mundane, something about a case, and she'd say something, and he'd say something, and then he'd just lean in and kiss her, like it was the most obvious thing in the world to do, and still – still – she'd feel herself go weak at the knees. Now, on _this_ night, when a case they'd both thought was closed had opened up again, she merely rested her head against the window of the taxi and watched world outside fly by.


	8. Chapter 8

**Immediately following the end of "Lucky Stiff."**

The Welcome-Back-Jack cake was chocolate. After the events of the last few days – the murder of Stan Klein, the faked medical examiner's report that resulted in Chad Klein's fall from grace, the chewing out they'd received from Liz Rodgers – cake was good, but chocolate was an absolute necessity.

At least, that was Connie's assessment. Mike had seemed somewhat reticent and more than a little distracted. It had been a close call – Liz Rodgers being in his office, Jack only moments from joining them and finding out what they had done before Mike had had a chance to mollify the ME. _Daddy went away_, Connie thought to herself, _and the kids got up to no good. _She ate another forkful of cake, watching as Jack wearily glad-handed his way around the roomful of well-wishers, a polite smile plastered on his face. Connie took a small sip of her champagne (her third cup, but who was counting), and gave him a small wave when he caught her eye.

She'd returned to her conversation with a few of her colleagues (subject: single men in New York and whether, after the age of forty, it was safe to assume there was something wrong with them), before noticing that Mike had finally made an appearance. She saw him shake Jack's hand and exchange a few words before turning away to glance around the room. Catching Connie's eye he made his way over to her. The conversation (which was close to reaching the conclusion that there was probably something wrong with _most_ single men in New York) ceased as he approached. He perched on the arm of the couch, next to where she was sitting, and gestured at her plate. Connie sighed, and handed it over, watching as he demolished the large forkful she'd cut for herself before handing it back. The significant glances that were exchanged among her recent conversation partners did not escape her, and she felt a tremor of annoyance: at her colleagues for their prurience, at Mike for his over-familiarity.

"You _could_ get your own piece, you know," she said, hearing a note of irritability creep into her voice.

If he caught it (and who was she kidding – he usually did), he didn't show it. Instead he shrugged. "Just wanted a bite," he informed her. "I'm heading back upstairs. Did you finish that warrant application?"

Connie sighed and nodded. "And Geoff researched those precedents you wanted. They're on your desk, as well." She took another sip of her champagne, enjoying the pleasantly fuzzy feeling in her head. "I'll be up in a bit to finish off the Klein paperwork."

Mike stood up. "No need. I've got it." He looked pointedly at her cup, a small smile on his face. "Something tells me you might not do the best job of it tonight."

She smirked and raised her cup at him in a "cheers" gesture, watching as he left the room. Chocolate and champagne. It was just what she needed after a rough few weeks. Her sister had been visiting her for four days already, and Connie suspected that her twelve-hour days had made her a terrible hostess.

*****

A half-hour later, determined to demonstrate that – fuzzy-headed or not – she was still capable, Connie left the room and headed back to her desk. It wasn't just pride; there was also no small measure of guilt. Eating cake and drinking champagne had lost its luster now that she knew Mike was upstairs plowing through both his paperwork and hers. The cake had long since been eaten, but she grabbed a half-bottle of champagne and two cups on her way out the door.

Exiting the elevator, she walked down the wall to his office, wondering why she felt strangely nervous, as if working late into the evening wasn't something she'd done before. (_It's well past office hours, and you're showing up at the boss's door with champagne, _a small voice in her head pointed out. _And you've had a little Dutch courage yourself. You really should turn around and walk away. Just pick up your briefcase from your desk and walk away. Your sister is meeting you in the lobby in an hour. Grab a cup of coffee, wait down there, and have a pleasant evening. No harm, no foul.)_ It was simple, really – what she should do. Obvious. Instead, she stopped by her desk only long enough to pick up her briefcase before walking to Mike's office and knocking gently on the doorframe.

He was sitting at his desk, tossing his baseball from hand to hand. He looked distracted, even a little uneasy. At the sound of her knock, he glanced up. She held the bottle aloft.

"The vultures downstairs ate all the cake, but I managed to snag some champagne," she said with a grin. "Care for some?"

The uneasy expression on his face (which had, if anything, deepened upon seeing her) relaxed into a smile. "Since when does the DA's office spring for champagne?" he asked.

Connie took a few steps into the room, dropped her briefcase onto the floor and sat down at the table nearest his desk. "Technically, it's sparkling wine," she admitted, lowering her voice as if acknowledging a dark secret.

"Technically," he echoed, watching as she used both hands to carefully pour them each a glass.

Connie handed him a cup and raised her own in a salute. "Here's to Dr. Rodgers' ability to look the other way."

Mike grinned. "And here's to close calls," he added. "May they always work in our favor." He took a long pull on his drink, handed the now-empty cup back to her.

Connie poured him a refill and handed it back, observing as he nearly drained it again. She suspected that the near-miss between Jack and Liz Rodgers had rattled him more than he wanted to let on. She considered asking him about it and decided against it. He'd deny it, say it was fine, he was fine, it's all good, Connie. He'd tell her that he was never worried, that it was all under control. He might even believe it.

She was silent for a moment, aware that he'd put the cup down and was resting his chin on his hand, watching her. She met his gaze for a moment, before he looked away, picking up a pen and a piece of paper and scribbling on it, suddenly all business.

Connie looked down at her hands. _Now would be a good time to leave, Rubirosa,_ she told herself. _A very good time to leave. This has all the ingredients for something deeply stupid, and you know it. You both know it. _She was reaching for her briefcase when her gaze fell on the paper Mike was focusing on so intently. It looked familiar.

"Is that Geoff's research?" she asked him. She'd hoped to have a chance to go over it herself before Mike got a look at it. Geoff was smart, but careless, and this carelessness had earned him the Wrath of Cutter on several occasions. Connie had hoped to spare him from it if at all possible.

Mike nodded, then placed the piece of paper he'd been scribbling on in front of her, tapping with his pen at the line he'd circled. "I'm gonna assume Geoff thinks he's citing People v. Jackson here, but it says People v._ Jameson_. Get him to correct it and tell him to pay attention next time, would you?" He shook his head. "You'd think working here might give him a passing familiarity with frequently-cited precedents in criminal law, but apparently not."

She flapped a hand at him. _Yeah, yeah, yeah. _

Mike took another small sip out of his cup, wrinkled his nose and set it aside, before sifting carefully through the tower of documents on one corner of his desk. Apparently, Connie thought, her guilt over leaving him cake-less and drink-less was unwarranted. Apparently, Mike was in no mood to shoot the breeze over a purloined cham…sparkling wine. This was probably for the best.

Mike shuffled a few more papers around on his desk. "Where's the warrant application for the search of Peter Nisbet's storage locker?"

"Under that brief near your elbow." Connie indicated the document with a nod of her head. The Nisbet case had landed on them several weeks ago, but they'd found out about the locker only a few hours before, in spite of Nisbet's attempts to hide it. Mike had been practically giddy at the discovery.

"Right." Mike picked the warrant up and examined it briefly, then stood and walked to his whiteboard, plucking a pen from the mug on his desk as he did so. He placed a small check mark by one of the scribbles ("_Nis locker – war app?"_) and turned towards her. "But we still have no connection between Nisbet and Saul Braun?"

Connie shook her head. "Nothing so far." She stared thoughtfully at the tower of papers on the corner of Mike's desk, wondering just how slight a breeze would be required before they all flowed off the desk like water. Out of the blue, she was overcome by the feeling that there was something she was missing – some connection she was overlooking, something that would probably come to her a lot quicker if she wasn't still feeling a little fuzzy.

"Nisbet's storage locker is in Piscatawy," she said suddenly.

Mike shot a quick glance at the warrant application he was still holding in one hand. "And?"

"Where did Braun teach?"

"NYU." He peered closely at her. "What about it?"

"His daughter…" Connie trailed off, remembering. "She said he'd told her he had to pay off a loan, right? With some extra teaching?"

She saw realization dawn in Mike's eyes, and was once again gratified by the fact that he could follow her easily down the path she was on, that she rarely had to spell things out for him. _(At least where work is concerned_, she added to herself.)

"You mean he might have been doing some work on the side at Rutgers?" Mike scratched the back of his neck and looked at her doubtfully. "An adjunct? It's a long shot. Anyway, I'd remember if he'd had a connection to Rutgers."

Connie rolled her eyes. Rutgers was Mike's undergraduate alma mater. Not only that, but it was just up the road from hers – something she'd discovered a couple of months back, during the prosecution of Ned Lasky, a man who had spent years seething over his ejection from a sorority party by one of the girls (one Joyce Foley) and who had eventually taken his revenge on her son. Connie's sympathy had been diluted by Joyce Foley's high-handedness, her unapologetic comments that the girls in her sorority had been from "good homes," that they'd been trying to meet boys they would want to marry, that she and her friends "didn't mix with the kids from the state school" – the way she'd praised herself by declaring how wrong it would have been to "encourage them." Connie remembered Mike's undisguised disdain when Joyce Foley had made these remarks – a disdain she had shared and had been unable to keep from showing on her face.

_("I would have dated a state school boy," Connie had informed Mike later, after the jury had returned its verdict, when they were in his office clearing up the remaining paperwork. _

_Mike had been at the whiteboard then, just as he was now. Scribbling. Thinking. Scribbling some more. "Oh, yeah?" he'd said absently. "So where were you when I was in college?"_

_She couldn't resist. "In kindergarten."_

_He'd half-turned, glanced over his shoulder, winced theatrically. "Ouch."_

_She'd snickered. "I'm just saying. We weren't all like that. You could find the eating clubs and the old boy's network and the trust fund kids at my school. But most of us…most of the people I knew…we all thought that Princeton had made some horrible mistake in letting us in, and pretty soon they'd realize it and kick us out. Most of us were there on scholarships and student loans and part-time jobs. And most of us laughed when some girl would tell us not to waste our time with the guys from the state school." She paused, then added: "Which in our case meant Rutgers."_

_Mike chuckled dryly. "I know." _

_She'd raised an eyebrow at him._

_He'd shrugged, and remarked casually, "I went to Rutgers,"_ _before turning to begin writing on the whiteboard again. When he'd spoken next, it was about some mundane detail of the case. She had surprised herself by feeling slightly disappointed.)_

Now, Connie shook herself and returned to the present. "You wouldn't remember where Braun was teaching if we never looked for it in the first place," she pointed out. "The first Jersey connection only came up a few hours ago, with the locker."

Mike still looked skeptical. "Are we sure he was teaching to make the extra money?"

"That's what Melissa said. I'm sure of it." Connie stood up from the table and walked to the desk, plucking a file off the top of the tower and opening it. She leaned against the desk, facing the whiteboard, and began flipping through the file for Braun's daughter's statement. She found what she was looking for and held it up triumphantly. "Here!" she told him, reading from the page. " 'Dad said he was having some money problems. He said he was doing some extra teaching.' "

Mike moved beside her, leaning against the desk himself and peering over her shoulder at the paper. "Huh," he remarked. "I stand corrected."

She smirked at him. "Care to repeat that?"

He opened his mouth to speak, then narrowed his eyes at her. "Don't gloat, Connie."

"I'm waiting."

"You know, that's really unattractive."

Connie ostentatiously examined her nails.

Mike sighed. "You were right. I was wrong." He shot her another look. "It's still a long shot, you know."

"Sore loser." She glanced at him over the file she was holding and smiled to herself. Mike had already pulled out his Blackberry and was tapping on it rapidly, before apparently hitting send.

"I'm requesting the information from Rutgers," he told her. When Connie favored him with an appreciative grin, he shrugged. "It's worth a shot," he observed, leaning over to examine Melissa Braun's statement again

"Even long shots come in occasionally," Connie reminded him, giving him a gentle nudge with her elbow. "Anyway," she began, "we should…"

The sentence faded. Afterwards, she was never quite sure why – why the atmosphere in the office abruptly changed as she spoke, why it suddenly seemed too quiet, the room too small. She hesitated, suddenly aware of how close Mike was, and glanced up. Mike had raised his eyes from the statement and was looking at her, an unidentifiable expression on his face.

And then, without warning, he leaned in and kissed her. The kiss was brief, almost chaste. She had just time to think _Oh my god, he's going to kiss me_, then _Oh my god, he's kissing me,_ and then _Oh my GOD, I'm letting him _and it was over. She stared at him, wide-eyed.

"I…" Mike shook his head, paused for a moment, then cleared his throat. "I didn't know I was going to do that."

"No?" She sounded, to her own ears, completely calm. Slightly clinical. She placed the document she'd been holding on the desk behind her and folded her arms.

Mike stood up and moved to stand in front of her. Their eyes met briefly before he dropped his gaze. "Jesus, Connie – "

She didn't let him finish. "Are you planning to do it again?"

There was a moment's silence while Mike contemplated the floor. Then he looked up and straight at her, took a deep breath. "Yes," he said, simply. His gaze was direct, almost challenging. _Your move, Connie. Tell me to get lost, remind me that you've had a few drinks, pretend you think I'm making a joke, whatever. I'll play along. Here's your chance. Here's your out._

She said nothing.

He nodded; she stood up and closed her eyes.

A moment later she heard him step closer. In the next, she felt his hand cup the side of her face, his thumb brushing her cheekbone gently. She could hear the faint hum of his computer behind her and the distant clanking of the elevator as it moved between floors. She sensed him pause briefly, studying her. Then his lips lightly touched hers, barely present, learning the shape of her mouth, breathing her in. It was like the first kiss, and yet nothing like it: sweet; nowhere near chaste. She made a small noise that was something like a sigh, and then he was kissing her – really kissing her – and she was kissing him back, softly at first, and then with more urgency, twining her arms around his neck and parting her lips, reveling in the taste of him while his hand left her face and his arms slipped around her to pull her close.

Later, when she thought about (and she did think about it, replaying it over and over in her mind while pacing her apartment anxiously), those next ten minutes or so came back to her not as one continuous chain of events, but in discrete snippets. A series of sensations: pressing herself against him more fully, hearing his breath catch as she moved her hips against him. The faint scent of his cologne. His fingers trailing along her spine, moving to her hair as his lips left hers in favor of her temple, her ear, the side of her neck.

She recalled other sensations, too: familiar/unfamiliar hands, first on her waist, then sliding up to her ribcage; a voice she'd heard day-in and day-out for over a year now, murmuring her name against her throat in tones she'd definitely _never_ heard before, not from him. Her own hands traveling down the length of his arms, feeling his fingers interlace with hers as she took a step back, half-leaning, half-sitting on the desk and pulling him against her, thinking that this was something they shouldn't be doing at all, that this was something they should have been doing all along, ignoring the hectoring voice in her head that kept asking her whether she had just completely lost her mind.

(And knowing, all the while, that she didn't need to listen to that voice, because this wasn't really her – obviously – and this wasn't really happening (obviously), because _she _would never find herself in the boss's office after hours, running her fingers through the boss's hair, feeling the boss's lips at the base of her neck, and _she_ would never find herself with her legs on either side of the boss's waist, his hands on her thighs, and she would _most certainly_ never be thinking to herself _at least I'm wearing pants at least I'm not sitting on his desk with a skirt hiked up to my hips at least there's that and that's something just don't let him stop don't stop_.

No, Connie Rubirosa would never do any of that, which meant that none of this was real. Obviously.)

And since it wasn't real, she could give herself up to this for the moment. She could stop thinking and just enjoy the feeling of his mouth on hers, because it felt good. More than good, actually. It felt…She gave a shuddery sigh. His hands lifted to cup her face again, and he kissed her briefly, gently, before pulling away to rest his head against hers. She could hear their uneven breathing against the silence of the office. Then Connie opened her eyes, and Mike did the same, and reality came rushing back.

He took a half-step away from her, glancing around the office, his arms dropping to his sides. She saw him take in the open door, the open blinds, the empty bottle of sparkling wine. They shared a look, and he smiled at her awkwardly, almost shyly. Silence descended. Mike took a deep breath and coughed politely.

"So this is a little…" He made a vague gesture at the room and at the (thankfully still empty) corridors beyond.

Connie waited, but Mike either wasn't able or wasn't inclined to finish his sentence. She pushed herself off the desk and began to readjust: sweater, pants, hair. "Stupid?" she supplied.

"I was going to say 'reckless'."

"That too."

"I mean, even by my standards."

She finished smoothing herself out and raised an eyebrow. "And what _are_ your standards for making out with a colleague?" she asked, honestly curious, wondering if the similarities between Mike and Jack extended to a shared propensity for getting involved with their assistants. She'd heard all the stories before she started working with Jack; Mike had always been more opaque. If there were stories about him, no one was talking, at least not to her.

Mike shrugged. "Ideally there wouldn't be any of _that _involved," he said, indicating the empty bottle. "And ideally _you_ would be. One out of the two's not bad, I guess."

She didn't get a chance to follow this up. _('Ideally', Mike? What does that even mean?) _Instead, her Blackberry, which had been abandoned on the table, vibrated briefly and then kicked off with a tinny rendition of _The Toreador Song_ from _Carmen_. Mike glanced at it, a slight smile quirking his mouth.

"My sister," Connie said, without needing to look at the device. She stepped around to the table, reaching for her phone while the aria swelled as much as the acoustics of the Blackberry would allow. She answered the call quietly. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Mike pick up his pen from where he had evidently dropped it on the floor, before running his hands through his hair and locking his fingers together behind his neck.

Elisabeth's breathless voice came through the phone. "I'm late, I know I'm late. I'm downstairs. I got turned around and ended up going the wrong way on Canal."

"It's fine." Connie bent over and picked up her briefcase, hurriedly assembling tomorrow morning's subway reading and placing it inside. "I was running a bit behind anyway. I'll be down in a sec."

There was moment's silence from the other end of the phone. Then – "Why do you sound weird?"

Connie shot a quick glance at Mike, but he'd turned slightly and was looking out the window, at the few lights still on in the neighboring buildings. His expression was unreadable. "What do you mean?" she asked.

"Your voice sounds funny. Is everything okay?"

"It's just been a long day, Lis. I'm on my way." She hung up the phone, and hesitated, not knowing what to say next. "My sister's here," she finally informed him, unnecessarily.

"I gathered." Mike leaned forward, bracing himself against the side of his desk with his hands and letting out a long exhalation. Turning his head towards her, he looked at her speculatively.

Another silence followed. "We should…probably talk about this," she said.

He laughed softly, looked back down at the desk, and nodded. _Yup. _

She shrugged on her coat, snapped her briefcase shut, and stood there uncertainly, unsure of how she should leave, what the protocol was. She guessed that Mike felt the same way, because he paused for a second, apparently about to speak, before pushing himself off the desk and picking up one of his baseballs. His shirt was untucked, his hair tousled. _I did that_, she thought, wondering why that knowledge sent a frisson of excitement through her rather than disturbing her in the way that, by rights, it ought to.

Something about her thoughts evidently came through in her demeanor. He tilted his head to the side slightly, his gaze moving from her eyes to her lips, then down the length of her body and back up. "You'll be late," he pointed out.

"I know." Despite herself, she blushed. "Stop looking at me like that." She was shooting for a blasé tone; she didn't quite succeed.

Mike smiled at her. Or, at least, he attempted to. It didn't touch his eyes, and she suspected that the competing anxiety and desire she saw in his face was reflected in her own. At last, he said, "I'll see you tomorrow."

She left the office and was halfway down the corridor when he called out after her. She turned.

He was watching her go, and as she looked at him she saw the ghost of a sly grin appear on his face. "Say hi to your sister for me."

She took a breath. _The whole situation,_ she told herself, _was a mess in the making_. _A bad idea. Bad and wrong. _And yet, the laugh escaped her before she could prevent it. It mingled with his.


	9. Chapter 9

**(I'd actually already written most of this as I was writing the last one, which is why I'm updating so quickly. It may be a while until the next update.)**

**This chapter jumps around a bit, so I hope you bear with me; it just worked best that way. It starts off as taking place during "Illegitimate" (i.e. set two weeks **_**after **_**the end of the last chapter), then jumps back to the morning after the end of the last chapter, before returning to the "Illegitimate" timeframe. Got it? No, me neither.**

The McIntyre case had been frustrating from day one. The cops had screwed up, and had introduced the murder of Norman Lukovitch while they questioned John McIntyre about Ian Dryden. Connie's attempts to step in and prevent the disaster she could see looming had earned her a dressing-down from Anita van Buren and, later, a dressing-down from the judge and a dismissal of the charge against McIntyre. Since then, they'd been gradually building the case against McIntyre for the murder of Lukovitch, and she'd grudgingly forgiven Lupo and Bernard for their misstep. This last had been at Mike's urging as they walked over to the two-seven to meet with the detectives.

_(He'd seen her set her jaw as she entered the precinct. As they prepared to exit the elevator, he'd put a hand on her arm._

"_I take it you're still pissed with Lupo and Bernard." he'd said._

_She shook her head, tightly. "If they'd at least apologize for their mistake instead of acting like nothing had happened, I'd be okay. I'm the one who took the hit in that courtroom, Mike. They got to just sit there and watch and then act surprised by it all."_

_Mike removed his hand from her arm and held the elevator door. "If it's an apology you're after, you might be waiting a while. The best you're going to get is an acknowledgement. You get that, and I'd let it go."_

_She'd muttered something under her breath that made clear she considered this unlikely. A few minutes later, when she'd given Lupo hard glare, she'd been rewarded with a chagrined expression and their admission that they'd tried to give her the best case possible. Tried and failed. Mike had shot Connie a pointed look and she'd relented and accepted the detectives' olive branch. From there, her frustrations with the case had eased somewhat.)_

Now as she politely sipped coffee from a delicate bone china cup, she had a feeling her blood pressure was about to rise yet again. She was seated across from Lois McIntyre, the mother of John Jay McIntyre, and the possible mistress of JFK – or so John McIntyre hoped. She and Mike had hoped to confirm or exclude McIntyre's basis for believing himself to be the illegitimate son of JFK. Unfortunately, Mrs. McIntyre, clad in a diaphanous leopard-print blouse and overpowering the room with the scent of Chanel No.5, was less interested in cooperating than she was in being coy. Their questions about her son's parentage were being parried at every turn, and Connie was beginning to get a headache, both from the perfume and from the effort to stay polite. _And if I'm having difficulty keeping my cool_, she thought, _Mike must at the end of his rope. _She glanced over at him quickly. He looked calm enough, but he was leaning forward in his chair, his eyes fixed on Mrs. McIntyre, focusing intently.

Connie returned her own gaze to Mrs. McIntyre. The roundabout approach definitely wasn't working. Mrs. McIntyre seemed determined to wring every last bit of ambiguity out of the situation, and quite obviously adored the attention. She batted her eyelashes and simpered at them, dreamily recalling her night at a fundraiser for Kennedy's presidential campaign.

Connie suppressed a sigh and decided in favor of a bit more directness. "Mrs. McIntyre," she began cautiously, "I'm sorry for being so blunt, but…did you have an intimate encounter with President Kennedy?"

Mrs. McIntyre seemed unbothered. "I told you," she reminded Connie, and as if speaking to a small child, "he wasn't President when I met him."

Mike shifted in his seat, and Connie could feel the exasperation radiating off him as Mrs. McIntyre began to wax lyrical about JFK. The older woman had just offered her opinion that JFK was "an irresistible man," when Mike interrupted her musings.

"Yes or no, Mrs. McIntyre," he said slowly, no longer hiding the irritation in his voice, "did you have sex with John Kennedy?"

Under other circumstances, Connie might have found Mrs. McIntyre's reaction entertaining – her flirtatious, mock-offended, oh-you-naughty-boy response to Mike's bluntness, contrasting neatly with the total lack of amusement on Mike's part. _I always wondered what people meant when they talked about someone having a case of the vapors,_ she thought. _She'll be calling for her smelling salts any second now._

She shook herself out of these thoughts just as Mrs. McIntyre informed them that she wasn't "the type to kiss and tell." Connie could almost hear Mike snap. He shot her a look _(That's it. I'm done. She's all yours.) _cleared his throat, and stood up, moving to look out the window.

"This is a criminal investigation." Connie said, trying to maintain an even tone, and deciding at last to pull out the big guns. "We can compel you answer the question."

This tack had only slightly more success. Lois McIntyre seemed unruffled by the threat, although she did hint that although she would have slept with JFK – had the opportunity presented itself – she had not. Connie felt a wave of relief wash over her at the prospect of leaving. The perfume was making her nauseous, and the coffee wasn't sitting right, probably because she'd drunk it on an empty stomach. She hadn't had much of an appetite for the past couple of weeks.

A few minutes later, during which Mike alternated between shaking his head and staring out the window, and tapping on his Blackberry, Connie rose, shook Mrs. McIntyre's hand and thanked her for her time. She and Mike were escorted to the door by her maid. Connie put on her coat, and waited until the door had closed behind them before letting out a low whistle. Mike leaned against the wall, resting the back of his head against it and closing his eyes.

"Unbelievable," he managed.

Connie chuckled.

He turned towards her and pushed himself off the wall. "I'm not sure who's more delusional, Mrs. McIntyre or her son."

"At least _she_ hasn't killed anyone."

"She nearly killed me in there."

They walked towards the elevator and waited for it to arrive. Connie raised a hand to her temple and rubbed gently. "Perfume headache," she explained in response to Mike's inquiring look. He nodded understandingly, and they lapsed into silence. It wasn't until the elevator was slowly making its way down to the lobby that he spoke next.

"Intimate encounter?"

Connie turned to gape at him. He was looking straight-ahead, a half-smile playing about his face. "Excuse me?" she said politely.

"You, talking to Blanche DuBois up there," he replied. "Hell of a euphemism, Connie. Very delicate of you."

She relaxed. "We can't all be bulldozers," she said, then giggled in spite of herself. "I really thought she was going to faint when you cut straight to the chase like that."

"Swoon," Mike corrected. "Women like that don't faint, they swoon." He glanced over at her. "Actually," he said, and now his voice was tinged with something different, something that made her blush slightly, "hearing you use the phrase 'intimate encounter' was easily the highlight of that whole conversation."

"Behave yourself, counselor."

"I always do."

The elevator doors opened and he moved aside to let her past. They stepped out into the winter cold, Connie relishing the crispness of the air, and feeling her headache begin to dissolve as they walked in the direction of the downtown 6 train. It seemed too much to hope that the hiccups they'd encountered in the case thus far would suddenly vanish, but with any luck the whole thing would be a little less like a visit to Bellevue. The wind began to pick up and she shivered. She felt Mike's hand on her back as they crossed the intersection, and gave him a quick smile. The hand briefly trailed down her back a few inches and she was momentarily puzzled by her competing desires to bat him away and, at the same time, to dispel the cold by moving closer. Still, she thought to herself, what would it be but simply the latest example of the ambiguity that had defined their interactions for the past couple of weeks?

*****

**Two weeks earlier**

The morning after the end of the Klein case, Jack's welcome back party, and – oh yes – the fifteen or so minutes spent making out with Mike on his desk, Connie made sure she was at work even earlier than usual. Mike, she suspected, was not a morning person, and she wanted – needed, for reasons she could not quite explain – to be at her desk before him. Although she was an early riser by nature, getting in to work early on that particular morning proved difficult. She'd spent the most of the night pacing her bedroom (as her sister snoozed on the pull-out couch on the other side of the wall), trying to accept the fact that what she'd suspected would eventually happen between her and Mike, had happened. Once she'd managed to do that, she'd then spent the remainder of the night trying to work out how she felt about it. This, as it turned out, was no small task.

Nonetheless, she managed to get to work twenty minutes ahead of her usual time, determined to Behave Normally. To her frustration, however, she arrived at her desk to see the light already on in Mike's office. She could faintly hear his half of a telephone conversation and, apparently taking advantage of Ida's absence in the adjoining office, the repeated thwack of a ball as he threw it against the wall and caught it. She switched on her computer, the light over her desk, and began unpacking her files for the day. Her day calendar reminded her that she had two arraignments to attend that morning, and she winced at the prospect of speaking in court – even for a routine matter – on two hours of sleep.

Glancing at her watch, she realized that she hadn't even had her morning coffee. Despite her determination to Behave Normally, she realized she'd already broken the routine she'd fallen into over the past year, in which she picked up two coffees in the morning: one for her and one for Mike. After lunch she usually picked up three: for her, for Mike, and for Jack.

_("I don't do this because I'm your assistant, you know," she'd told Mike once, after she'd gone to a different coffee cart and he'd emerged from his office complaining that the coffee tasted burnt. "I do it because I'm nice."_

"_A nice assistant," he'd agreed. "Seriously, Connie, this is undrinkable."_

"_I'm sure you'll come up with some way to redress the situation," she'd responded unfeelingly._

_Twenty minutes later, he'd left the office and returned with two cups of coffee, one of which he'd wordlessly plunked down on her desk as he passed by.)_

She thought it over for a moment before deciding that any deviation from her usual routine would definitely qualify as Not Behaving Normally. She grabbed her purse and coat, went downstairs, and purchased two coffees from the cart in front of the building. When she returned, the thwack of the ball had stopped, as had the phone conversation. She took off her jacket and walked to the door of Mike's office, attempting to look casual, feeling faintly edgy.

He standing at his work table, arranging some papers on it in what she assumed was some sort of logical order. He glanced up as she appeared in the doorway, and she didn't miss the slightly watchful look in his eyes. There was a moment's silence.

"Hi," he said at last, in tones noticeably gentler than the usual, pre-caffeinated, slightly clipped 'G'morning' he typically managed when he breezed past her desk for the first time each day.

"Hey," she responded, holding up one of the cups. "The usual?"

Mike smiled, and she thought she could see relief flash through his eyes. Their routine was undisturbed – no dramatics, no hysteria. _Men,_ Connie thought, inwardly rolling her eyes. She held the coffee out to him.

Mike stepped around from the table to take the cup from her. "Thanks." His fingers brushed hers, and she looked up to see a faint grin tugging at the corners of his mouth, a teasing look in his eyes.

The effect was contagious, and she dropped her gaze and pursed her lips together to stop herself from snickering. _(So how are you? Good? Good. Sooooo, twelve hours ago I was unbuttoning your shirt, right? Riiiiight, right. Thought so. How 'bout that, huh?)_

She composed herself with an effort. "What?" she asked, innocently.

The grin made a brief, full-fledged appearance before he cleared his throat and turned away, back to his table. "Nothing," he replied, just as innocently, before glancing at his Blackberry and returning to his professional mode. "You have two arraignments this morning?"

Connie mmm'd a response, and he picked up a pen and wrote something on the cover of one of his file folders. "Good luck with that."

"I'll need it," she said, wearily. When he raised his eyebrows at her, she added, "I didn't get much sleep last night."

"Ah." Mike pondered this for a moment. "No, me neither."

She gestured in the direction of the door. "Anyway, I'd better…"

He nodded, and she walked back to her desk. It could've been worse, she supposed. No awkwardness whatsoever had been too much to hope for. A moment later her Blackberry chirped with a message. She opened it. Mike.

_Drink after work?_ it read.

Connie typed rapidly (_Probably a good idea_) and hit send. She sat down at her desk and sorted through the papers she would need for the morning's arraignments. She'd have to return to Mike's office to discuss those cases and their pre-trial strategy, but her trepidation had abated. They seemed to have come to a shared and unspoken decision not to talk about the previous evening while at work. _Ironic,_ she thought. _Making out in the office? No problem. Talking about the fact that we made out in the office? Clearly inappropriate._

In the end, the arraignments went well, in spite of the fact that the judge in one case had caught her yawning for the third time and, with excessive politeness, had apologized to Connie, on behalf of the court, for keeping her awake. It hadn't mattered. Connie had successfully argued for remand in both cases, sending Mike a victorious update after each result.

She arrived back at her desk feeling tired and not very hungry, in spite of the fact that it was her usual time for lunch. She checked her voicemail fruitlessly, hoping for word from her sister, who'd had a job interview that morning and hung up just as Mike passed her desk, coat and gloves on, presumably on his way out to lunch. He paused briefly.

"Lupo and Bernard heard back from Rutgers," he informed her. "Congratulations. Saul Braun taught two night classes there last semester."

"What did I say about long shots?" she reminded him.

"I owe you a drink."

"You owe me dinner," she responded unthinkingly, before realizing that the events of last night had colored this kind of suggestion, even if only temporarily. She saw the smile on Mike's face give way to a similar realization.

"We could…probably manage that," he replied, his voice sounding a little surprised, a little uncertain.

She mentally kicked herself as he moved away and towards the elevators, wondering just how much everything had changed between them. She began to compose and rehearse a variety of speeches in her head, to be recalled and used later that evening. In her head, she was serene and articulate, eminently practical. The speeches usually involved the liberal use of words like "appropriate," and "professional," and "complications." Other times, they contained words like "careful" and "discreet." She looked at the time on her computer and began the countdown to the end of the day.

******

Any belief she'd had that they would put the previous evening behind them and carry on as usual, was dispelled when he sent her a message later that afternoon, suggesting an out-of-the-way bar. Such a belief was further vanquished by his suggestion that it would "be easiest" if he came directly from the courthouse and met her there. Leaving work separately when they were meeting for a drink, she noted to herself, was definitely Not Behaving Normally.

When she arrived, he was already in a booth, sipping on a glass of what appeared to be scotch. As often happened when he left the office, his tie had vanished and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone. He nodded at her as she slipped into the seat across from him and ordered a glass of red wine. He did not, as she'd half-expected and half-feared, immediately launch into an analysis of the previous evening. They discussed one of the cases he was trying and one that was coming up for both of them. Connie relaxed a bit and ordered another glass of wine.

"I think I'll stay away from the sparkling wine tonight," she told him, attempting to be light-hearted. She was glad when this elicited a wry smile.

"No telling where that might end up," he agreed.

The conversation faded, and Connie could sense him figuring out his approach. She decided to put him out of his misery.

"So, last night…" she offered.

Mike propped his chin on his hand and regarded her thoughtfully. "Well," he said slowly, "I guess I probably shouldn't embarrass myself by telling you how long I've thought about doing that."

Connie could feel herself redden and decided to put it down to the wine. "It may have crossed my mind, too," she admitted. "Once or twice."

"So now what?"

"I don't know," she said truthfully. "We work together. You're my boss."

"I've noticed that."

"And the potential damage to our working relationship is just…" Connie sighed, unsure of how to proceed. "And not just our working relationship, either," she said at last. "There's our friendship, our reputations. I think we both know that the smartest thing to do would be to forget it happened."

"It's certainly the easiest thing to do, I'll give you that." Mike responded, drinking the last of his scotch.

"It's not that I'm not attracted to you," she added hastily, wondering if she'd imagined the faint undertone of irritation in his voice. "I am. Even though you drive me up the wall pretty much every day, at some point." They exchanged smiles, and she paused again, annoyed by the fact that the eloquent speeches she'd spent the afternoon composing in her head had deserted her. "It's difficult. And I need more than twenty-four hours to think it through. This kind of thing is just…it's not how I see myself."

Mike gestured at the waiter for another drink. "What kind of thing is that?"

Connie made a helpless gesture. "An affair with the boss. An office fling. Whatever you want to call it."

Mike considered this while the waiter brought the new glass of scotch to the table, and he appeared to continue his consideration as he took the first sip. Connie shifted in her seat uneasily and waited.

Finally he raised his eyes. "Do you really think 'this kind of thing' is how I see myself?" he asked her.

"I don't know. I don't know whether you make a habit of – "

Mike held up a hand to stop her. "I'm not Jack McCoy," he said firmly. "And, for the record, this isn't how I see myself, either." He swirled the amber liquid in his glass for a moment before continuing, in a quieter voice. "You're not the only one who's conflicted about this, Connie."

She nodded, a little ashamed of herself for implying otherwise.

"And you're not the only one who didn't get any sleep last night," Mike added. "I've been going over and over it, trying to be realistic, wishing it hadn't happened at all, wishing it had gone a lot further…" He trailed off.

"And what did you come up with?" she prompted.

Mike shrugged. "I haven't ruled anything out. That's as far as I got."

She nodded slowly. "Then that'll have to do for now."

They left the bar shortly after that, stepping into the winter cold that seemed to have deepened over the past few days. Connie shifted from foot to foot, scanning the streets for a taxi. She was uncomfortably aware that she wasn't sure what they'd agreed to. Neither, she suspected, was Mike. Given this, she thought later, perhaps it should have surprised her that after he hailed her a cab, her polite kiss on the cheek turned into much more – another of those slow, exploratory kisses from last night, interrupted only when the cabbie irritably honked his horn. Perhaps it should have surprised her, but it didn't. Nor did it surprise her when he leaned down into the cab and asked her, courteously, whether or not they were "going to have to have another big discussion about this tomorrow." And finally, it didn't surprise her to hear herself casually say "nope" before closing the door of the cab and directing the cabbie to Brooklyn.

******

**Two weeks later**

As the remains of the headache from Mrs. McIntyre's perfume faded, Connie mentally reviewed the past couple of weeks. The only thing they'd agreed, apparently, was to live in a state of denial. Most of the time this worked, she thought as she sat down at her desk, opened a fresh pack of licorice and woke up her computer. Their professional relationship was still healthy, still effective. In fact, she'd go so far as to say that it was basically unchanged. _Except,_ pointed out the small, nagging voice in her head (the one that sounded a lot like her mother) _for the two or three times since then, where you've gone out for a nice collegial meal or a drink, ended up kissing against a cab, and then good morning'd each other the next day like nothing happened. Or the way you both avoid working late in his office because you both know what'll happen if you do. "Basically unchanged," yeah. Except._

It was untenable, and she knew it. She also knew that things were likely to come to a head sooner rather than later. In the meantime, there was the McIntyre case to be focusing on. She and Mike were meeting with McIntyre and his lawyer in a couple of hours, and they needed to formulate a plan of attack. She'd walked past Mike's office a few minutes earlier and seen him pacing back and forth, baseball glove on, baseball in hand. He was plotting something. She'd find out what it was soon enough, and then she'd focus on that. They both would.


	10. Chapter 10

**In and around (and slightly before) "Crimebusters" **

When you want to smack yourself upside the head, Mike Cutter decided, it's usually a bad sign. Yet as the McIntyre case was wrapping up, Mike reluctantly accepted that he was actually starting to annoy himself. The events that preceded this realization had occurred the previous evening, as he had sat with Connie at the table in his office and laid out his plan for goading McIntyre into admitting his guilt. They'd agreed on their strategy and she'd been in the middle of packing up her briefcase to leave for the day when Jack – also apparently on his way home – had stopped by and tossed an unsealed envelope at Mike.

"You're doing this," was all he'd said.

Mike had opened the envelope and groaned. "Jack – "

"Consider it your civic duty."

"Prosecuting homicides doesn't count?" Mike had stared bleakly at the piece of paper he was holding. "It's not as if I don't have enough on my plate already, you know."

Jack had gazed at him impassively and shrugged. "Welcome to the big leagues, Mike," he said cheerily, before leaving the office.

Connie, who had paused in the middle of organizing her files, turned to him expectantly. "What was that about?"

"Jack's been asked to provide a speaker for a Bar Association panel next month." He handed her the envelope, a pained expression on his face. "Guess who drew the short straw?"

Connie skimmed its contents quickly. "'Panel Discussion on The Legal Aid Society's Proposal for Criminal Discovery Reform in New York,'" she read aloud, before raising her eyes and sending a teasing glance his way. "You know I'd offer to step in for you, but I think they want somebody a little more…senior."

He shot her a mock-glare, watching as she pulled on her coat and picked up her briefcase. "Is that an age crack, Rubirosa?"

Connie snickered. "Someone with more _seniority_, then," she clarified. "This is part of the deal you know, Mike. You get the nice office, you get the obligations that come with it. And you've been sliding your way out of these for a year now." She ceased struggling with the buttons on her coat long enough to give him a sympathetic smile. "Don't worry. I'll be cheerleading from the audience."

"Pom-poms and all, I suppose."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Only if you're very lucky." Without giving him a chance to respond, she turned and walked out of the office, waving at him over her shoulder. " 'Night, Mike."

And that was it. That was when it happened: when he glanced out the window behind his desk, and realized, to his embarrassment, that yes – that was him sitting there with his chin propped on one hand and a lascivious grin on his face, gazing after Connie's retreating form. He shook himself, cleared his throat, and returned to the documents in front of him. _Jesus, Mike. You're a forty-five year-old man, not a hormonal teenage boy. Get it together._

*****

In the end, the case had wrapped up relatively quickly, when their gamble that John Jay McIntyre would rather be incarcerated as a Kennedy than free as a McIntyre paid off in a confession that – ironically – ensured he was neither. A week later saw Mike checking and signing off on the final paperwork before turning it over to Jack. It was a relief to be done with the case, particularly in light of the fact that Lupo and Bernard had made an arrest on another case – this time the bombing of a recruitment center, which had resulted in the death of a baby. Cases like that were usually the worst, and involved the closest media scrutiny.

He let out a long exhalation and returned to the McIntyre paperwork. He suspected that the roots of his annoyance with himself lay in the new ambiguity of his relationship with Connie. In other circumstances, there would be no problem, no annoyance. In other circumstances, he'd be able to enjoy the new developments between them without any reservations. In these circumstances, his feelings were shaded by a sense of disquiet, and no small amount of irritation at both his own lack of self-control and his inability to draw the line, a long time ago, at harmless flirtation and maybe-if-things-were-different fantasies. _She's nearly fifteen years younger than you. She works with you. She reports directly __**to**__ you. So stop playing with fire, and stop trying to convince yourself that this isn't a terrible idea. _

Almost against his will, his mind drifted back the evening before last. He and Connie had gone out to dinner to celebrate the end of the McIntyre case and to his relief (and hers, he suspected), they had both been extremely well-behaved. They'd chatted about McIntyre's plea, about the case that looked like it was on its way, about work, about hobbies…friendly but professional. Just as it should be. Or at least, just as it should be until they stepped outside. Just as it should be until he helped her into her coat and she took a deliberate step back, so that he could feel warmth of her body radiating from her. Just as it should be until he saw his hands, which had been resting on her shoulders, turn her around to face him so that he could kiss her hungrily, his fingers threading into her hair as she reached for the lapels of his coat to bring him closer. At which point, and once again, it had been easy – too easy – to worry about tomorrow when tomorrow came. So he'd given up and lost himself in the feel of her mouth against his, until the kisses became too heated, until her hands hand found their way inside his coat, until he'd found himself close to allowing the last shreds of his better judgment to slip away entirely. Until they'd paused for breath and she'd studied him, shaking her head, a small smile on her face.

"What are we doing, Mike?"

He'd laughed softly and considered the question for a moment. "I have absolutely no idea," he'd replied, dipping his head to kiss her again, gently this time. Almost affectionately. "You?"

She'd returned the kiss. "Not a single one."

And then someone had opened the door to the restaurant and she'd backed away, startled. They'd said polite goodbyes, and the next day they said good morning and later on they'd said good night, and she went her way and he went his, and in between that they were colleagues. Friends. Kiss? What kiss?

He picked up his pen and signed off on the last of the McIntyre case papers, before carrying them into Jack's office. The DA was sitting at his desk, reading glasses on surrounded by several teetering stacks of papers.

"The McIntyre plea," Mike said, indicating the brown manila envelope before putting it down on Jack's desk. "Sorry to add to your paperwork headaches."

Jack picked up the envelope, inspected it, and deposited it on the top of one of the stacks of paper with a sigh. "You give me some sort of headache every day, Mike. Why should today be any different?"

Mike smirked. "What can I say, Jack? I'm a big fan of keeping traditions alive."

Jack frowned at this, regarding Mike for a second with narrowed eyes, before shrugging. "Where are we on the recruitment center bombing?"

"Derek Sherman's still insisting that he threw a brick through the window of the recruitment center and nothing more. And thanks to _Operation Molly_, not only are the bricks found at Sherman's house are out, but his lawyer can probably introduce reasonable doubt on the backpack."

Jack rolled his eyes. "Why Anita decided to work with them I'll never understand." He picked up his pen and began writing again. "Let me know of any new developments. The papers are having a field day with this."

*****

The case only began to get really messy a few days later. The antics of _Operation Molly,_ it turned out, were only the beginning of their troubles. New evidence appeared that, instead of confirming Derek Sherman's guilt, began pointing alarmingly to Carly, the baby's mother. To make matters worse, Connie suspected that she and Mike were beginning to part ways on which of the two – Derek Sherman or Carly DiGravia – they favored, with Mike now considering Carly the better suspect.

He said as much to her shortly after Connie interviewed Carly's drinking partner from Carly's night out– a night out which had made the cover of the local tabloids and which had triggered yet another round of finger-pointing at the police and the DA. Connie had returned from her visit with a recording of Carly's voice claiming, among other things, she had never wanted her baby and discussing her plans to move to Florida and get a job on the beach. She'd sent the cell-phone recording down to the guys in IT right away and received the electronic audio file several hours later. Mike had decided to go out in search of food for another evening at the office, rather than ordering in (having muttered something about needing a walk). Connie didn't look forward to playing the tape of Carly for him. Over the past twenty-four hours, he'd become increasingly convinced that Carly was responsible for the baby's death (although not so convinced, Connie noted wryly, that he was ready to release Derek Sherman).

She doodled on a piece of paper, absently, trying to weigh up the evidence on each side. Mike returned a few minutes later, the chill of the winter air outside still clinging to him.

"There's good news and bad news," he informed her, placing two large bags down on the table. "The bad news is that I made things a lot more complicated, because I couldn't decide what to get. The good news is that now we have more food, even assuming Jack comes in and helps himself, which we both know he will."

"No gloves?" she inquired indicating his bare hands.

"I like living dangerously," he replied, stepping behind her to hang up his coat.

He placed the back of one frozen hand against her cheek as he did so, and she swatted him away with the brief she was holding. She was aware that she was smiling, aware that she was pleased that he was back – pleased to be working late with him, albeit with Jack just down the hall, unwittingly playing chaperone. Mike had returned to the table and was unpacking the bags of food, and she stood to help him, impulsively reaching out, taking one of his hands between her two.

"Still cold," she observed, mildly.

He looked down at their hands. His expression contained surprise, and something Connie identified – to her own embarrassment – as a touch of discomfort. She considered letting go, had even started to do so, when she felt his fingers tighten on hers.

"We can't keep…" he began.

She felt the knot in her stomach tighten. "Mike?"

He studied her, and took a step closer. When he spoke her name, she could hear the ache behind it.

She felt a sudden urge to lean forward, just a little bit. Just enough to brush her lips over his lightly. (_Just once. One little peck. They don't always have to turn into another one, and another one after that. I am Connie Rubirosa, and I am in control of myself.) _ She swallowed hard. "Jack's just down the hall."

He held her gaze for a moment, and she could sense the challenge._ So?_

Then the moment passed, and he favored her with that familiar half-smile, half-smirk. "Right. Good point." He gave one of her hands a quick squeeze before turning back to unpacking the food.

Connie sat down again, her head swimming. The whole exchange had made her shiver, which in turn made her uncomfortable. She had never considered herself unemotional person, in spite of what she knew was her workplace reputation as "professional" (if you wanted to be diplomatic – and some were) or an "ice queen" (if you didn't – and some weren't). Emotions – respect, warmth, admiration – weren't, in this case, what was bothering her. She realized that – realized it _again,_ more precisely – as she watched Mike rifle through the bag of food.

The nice, polite boys – the nice, polite men – of her dating and relationship history had elicited emotions. Mike elicited something that was, for her, less familiar, more alarming: she wanted him. It was simple. Basic. She liked Mike, she enjoyed his company…so far, so respectable. In most cases – with the nice, polite, eminently suitable men of her past – desire had followed that, had grown _from_ that. It didn't spring up suddenly, clouding other thoughts, interfering with her basically rational nature, out of her control. She didn't – Connie Rubirosa most definitely did _not _– look at a man's hands (a man she hardly knew, really) and imagine them on her. She did not look at his mouth and feel a sudden craving that was so uncharacteristic of her as to be almost shocking. It was what she had tried to explain to him once before. _This is not me. And because it is not me, I am afraid._

The scent of the food filled the air and, she estimated, would make its way to Jack's office – and Jack's nose – in ten minutes or so. Jack would no doubt follow shortly thereafter. Connie's anxiety faded as she watched in amazement while the food appeared.

"Crèpes _and_ falafel?" she asked. Then, peering closer – "And is that baklava?"

Mike grinned, and passed her the iced tea she'd requested, before contemplating at the food that was now spread out across the table. "I did a tour of the food carts in Foley Square," he said. "I think this time I may have overdone it."

Connie returned her attention to the laptop and began queuing up the audio file of Carly's night on the town. When she played it for Mike, he looked thoughtful. "More and more dots connecting, Connie," he told her. Then, taking in her unconvinced expression, he added, "You don't agree."

"I'm not convinced," she replied. "It's a selective recording. We can't hear the whole evening's conversation. She was drinking. It's easy to take things out of context and misinterpret them."

"So when a woman says that she wishes she'd never had her baby, exactly how many ways are there to interpret that?"

"Spoken like a non-parent," Connie pointed out, breaking open the pita bread and beginning to assemble the falafel and salad.

Mike was silent for a moment. "Fair enough," he said at last, in a voice that suggested he wasn't so much agreeing with her as attempting to keep the peace.

*****

That peace was broken less than twenty-four hours later. To make matters worse, it was broken at the two-seven, and in front of Bernard, Lupo, _and_ Anita Van Buren. The office environment had done little to dispel the tension between them on the case, nor the sense of unease she felt regarding how they would handle their differences on it. Their relationship remained ambiguous. _Mostly professional_, she thought, _and then – sometimes – really, really, not._

They took the recording to the police station early the next morning to play it for Bernard, Lupo, and Van Buren.

"She sounds drunk," Van Buren observed, after listening to it. "She sounds hurt and lost. That doesn't prove anything."

"The recording doesn't tell the whole story," Bernard noted. "Who knows what the other girl told her to get her to make these statements?"

Lupo, on the other hand, appeared to quietly side with Mike, and after scanning his Blackberry, he observed that Carly had just checked out of her hotel, adding pointedly, "Next stop could be Florida."

Van Buren turned to Mike. "What do you want to do?" she asked.

"Arrest her," Mike replied. "We'll release Sherman."

Connie was startled. "Whoa. Shouldn't we talk to Jack first?"

Mike glanced at her only briefly. "He's at a fundraiser announcing Adam Schiff's endorsement," he said.

"We screw this up for him, there's not going to be anything left to endorse."

There was a moment's awkward silence while Mike regarded her. Lupo, Bernard, and Van Buren – sensing the tension – looked back and forth between the two of them. Then Mike turned to Van Buren. "Go ahead," he told her, quietly.

Connie saw Bernard and Lupo exchange a look, and she caught the look on Anita Van Buren's face _(Yikes!)_ before she turned away. When they had left, she sat back in her seat, shaking her head, and watching as Mike organized the papers on the table and repacked them into his briefcase. She was about to ask him whether he'd really thought this through when he spoke, without looking up.

"Please don't do that again." he told her. He sounded calm, but she could hear the annoyance underneath.

"Do what again?"

"Question me in front of the cops like that."

She gaped at him. "Excuse me?"

He looked up, finally, and she realized that he was more than annoyed. He was angry.

"It's unprofessional, Connie."

"But _you_ overruling _me_ in front of them is just fine, I suppose."

"_I'm_ not _your _assistant," he said, coldly. "I'm happy to take your opinion into account, but there's a time and a place, and whatever's going on between us," he paused for a second and shook his head, "or _not_ going on between us, doesn't change that. You wouldn't have pulled that with Jack. _Don't_ pull it with me."

Connie felt her own temper beginning to rise. "Wait a minute. Are you pulling rank on me?"

Mike closed his briefcase with a snap. "Do I have to?"

She took a deep breath, trying to calm down, still stunned at having been called "unprofessional" for the first time in her career. "Of course not," she replied. "I apologize."

He'd placed a hand on the doorknob, and out of the corner of her eye she saw him turn towards her, watching her. She heard him sigh and she could sense the anger go out of him. "Connie – "

She held up a hand, and gestured at the door. "Shall we?"

He opened it and they left the building.

*****

Connie Rubirosa had never been a teacher's pet when she was at school. Not exactly. Not in the kind of overt, obsequious manner that some kids had. The kind of obvious apple-polishing that drew unwanted attention. Connie flew under the radar, and that was how she liked it. She'd quietly made friends, quietly got involved with the student council, quietly joined the yearbook committee, and quietly got the kinds of grades that resulted in admissions to top flight colleges. Through it all she had managed to delicately walk the tightrope of being involved and being as anonymous as possible. (_Easy enough to stay invisible,_ she thought in the years following, _when you're carrying an extra twenty pounds._) And through it all, and during her college years, she had never once received a dressing down from a teacher (or later, a professor) for being unorganized, inefficient, unprofessional. She'd made her share of mistakes in the DA's office, but she was always good old Connie, reliable Connie, with her nose to the grindstone.

Her confrontation with Mike, as a result, made her feel like a child who'd been caught passing notes in class. It was the first time her behavior towards a colleague had ever come up for questioning. The fact that it was Mike added an extra helping of embarrassment. Even if she wasn't entirely sure he was right, he was still her boss. The events of that afternoon had brought that home forcefully. They spent time together, he seemed to value her opinion, they had a good working relationship, she liked him. And he was her boss. He gave her assignments. He wrote her annual performance review before it went to Jack. When she took a (rare) vacation, he approved the request.

Their relationship (_Small 'r' _she added to herself) was a minefield, and she'd known that already, but it was a theoretical knowledge, like someone who'd never seen snow would know that it was cold and soft. Now she – they – had experienced it first-hand. To think they could just go out tonight, after work, and grab the dinner they'd agreed to this morning was unrealistic. There would be no nice, neat separation between Mike and Connie at work, and Mike and Connie everywhere else. To think otherwise was naïve.

She realized suddenly that her computer screen had gone dark, and that she'd been staring blankly at it for a good ten minutes without typing, and probably without moving. She glanced around the office self-consciously, but no one appeared to have noticed her wool-gathering, so she jiggled the mouse to wake up the computer, gave the contents of the screen a quick edit and printed out the document, before walking to Mike's office.

"Here's the statement from Carly's father-in-law," she told him, handing across the paper.

"Thanks." He glanced at it briefly and returned to his writing.

She took a breath to speak, paused, then tried again. "And I was wondering if we could maybe take a rain check on dinner tonight."

Mike placed the pen he'd been writing with down on his desk, glanced at his watch, and sat back in his chair, folding his arms. "Three hours, thirty-seven minutes," he remarked.

"Sorry?"

"I figured this was coming," he said, lightly. "You didn't waste much time, though."

"I'm not canceling," she pointed out. "I just don't really see the point of going to dinner when we've been at each other's throats over the case."

"You don't think we can leave it behind?"

"Sure. We'll pretend nothing out of the ordinary has happened, and we can sit down to dinner, and you can ask me how my day was, and I can tell you all about what a jerk my boss is."

At this, Mike raised his eyebrows. "Why not? I have a few choice complaints about one of my colleagues, too. And as far as pretending nothing out of the ordinary has happened, I think we both know we're more than capable of that."

Connie dropped her gaze and studied the carpet for a moment. When she looked up, he was studying a spot on his desk.

"You and I need to figure out exactly what the hell is going on here," he said, quietly. "I can't keep doing this."

"Doing what?"

Mike uncrossed his arms and returned to his writing. "That's my question, too," he said. He sounded suddenly tired.

_Oh._ She took another step into the office and waited patiently until she had his attention again. "Can we put the big conversation on hold until we get through this case?" she asked him gently.

"There'll always be another case, Connie," he said. "We could probably carry on like this for years."

Her laugh was wry, touched with a little sadness. "Let's try and avoid that," she said.

He smiled back at her. "I'm not sure I'd be good company tonight, anyway. I'll see you tomorrow."

"See you tomorrow, then."

He nodded, but didn't look up. A second later he heard her leave the room. Less than an hour after that, he saw the light at her desk click off, as she left for the evening. He put his pen down on his desk a moment later and rested his head in his hands. _This is a terrible idea./Why?/Because it is./You don't know that._

Mike stood up and walked to the window behind his desk, overlooking Hogan Place. He saw Connie, wrapped in her winter coat and struggling with an overstuffed briefcase, emerge from the building and gingerly pick her way through the snowdrifts and in the direction of the subway. He saw her stop at the corner, turn and look back at the building, up in the general direction of his office. He lifted his hand in a wave even as he realized that she wouldn't be able to see him. He smiled.

_This is not a terrible idea._


	11. Chapter 11

**In and around "Crimebusters" (still)**

The prosecution in the death of the infant in the recruitment center bombing ended up being one of the more difficult cases Connie had been involved in. In normal circumstance, even those in which a defendant was found not guilty, Connie was able to console herself with the belief that she'd tried her best, that they'd done the best with what they had. In this case, that option wasn't there. In this case, there was no prosecution, no verdict with which to come to terms. The charges were withdrawn against the baby's mother and against Derek Sherman. The only thing Connie was sure about was that no one would be held accountable. The other thing she was fairly certain about was that the whole fiasco would damage Jack's election campaign.

Nor, as a result of the case and their continuing differences of opinion on it, had things much improved between her and Mike. They'd been polite, of course. Uncharacteristically polite, in fact – both of them treading cautiously around each other, aware of the serious difference of opinion about the case that lay just below the surface of their interactions, and reluctant to stir them up. (As Connie returned to her desk afterwards and began to sift through the contents of her in-tray, she noted sardonically to herself that on the walk back from court they'd even discussed the weather.) And, by unspoken but apparently mutual agreement, they had gone their separate ways at the end of each day. Connie had tried and failed to figure out how best to navigate, on the one hand, the new ambiguity of their relationship and, on the other, their disagreement over the case. She had come up short, and so, it seemed, had Mike. Once, he'd paused briefly after wishing her a good night, and had seemed about to speak, before shaking his head and moving off in the direction of the elevators.

When they discovered that Derek Sherman had, despite his claims to the contrary, plenty of experience with butane, the fragile armistice that had been established disintegrated. Mike had stormed angrily into a meeting with Sherman and his lawyer and then stormed out, no less angry, but still – Connie thought – determined to stand his ground regarding his belief in Carly's guilt. _He's angry because Derek Sherman just complicated his case against Carly,_ Connie thought, _not because he thinks it raises questions about Carly's guilt._ She felt a twinge of annoyance at his single-mindedness.

Their subsequent meeting in his office, and with Jack, had been only slightly less fraught than their meeting with Derek Sherman. Jack was visibly annoyed at the latest turn of events, and at Mike and Connie's apparent inability not only to agree on their favored suspect, but to have such a difference of opinion in the middle of a trial. At this point, Connie pointed out the importance of the fact that Derek Sherman could now be linked with butane. She could sense Mike's irritation as she did so, and out of the corner of her eye she could see him shoot her a look, as he countered that Carly could be linked to both butane _and_ blasting caps.

The twinge of annoyance Connie had felt earlier resurfaced. More problematically, it seemed to make itself evident on her face, and Mike, catching it, had lifted the photograph taken of Carly after the bombing and dropped it on the desk in front of her.

"Do these look like the injuries of a mother who tried to save her baby from an inferno?" he asked her.

Connie glanced at the picture briefly, dismissively. "_That's_ not evidence," she responded, attempting to counter his flair for the dramatic with reason. Then, unable to stop herself, she added, "_You_ sound like Operation Molly."

Mike snorted and opened his mouth to argue back, but Jack – plainly at the end of his rope – interceded.

"Enough," he told them, sounding less like the DA and more like a father breaking up a fight between squabbling children by threatening to turn the car around and go home. "Mr. Sherman's adventures in drug dealing are Brady material. You have to tell Carly's lawyer about it."

He swept out of the room, and an awkward silence fell. The truce, such as it was, was over. Connie caught Mike's eye briefly and they both looked away without a word. The expression on his face was the same, she suspected, as that on hers. He was digging his heels in, unwilling to budge, unwilling to apologize for his point of view. Connie, who felt exactly the same way, set her jaw and walked out of the room to gather her belongings for what she already knew would be a tense and silent walk over to the courthouse, this time without even the veneer of polite small talk.

*******

As she'd expected and feared, her disagreement with Mike was indicative of much more than a difference of opinion. The lack of convincing evidence on either side – or, rather, the presence of too much evidence on both sides – introduced unsustainable levels of reasonable doubt. In the end, Jack had taken the only choice that was really available to him: he had declined to prosecute either party.

He had made the decision in his office, after Connie and Mike had presented him with the situation – each still arguing the likelihood of their being able to convict Sherman (Connie) or Carly (Mike). Jack had picked up the phone on his desk, informed Public Information of an imminent press release, and told them both of his decision.

For the first time in several weeks, the zealousness had vanished from Mike's eyes, replaced by a look of concern. "You're going to take a lot of heat for this," he told Jack.

Jack sat back down at his desk. "I can live with that," he replied heavily, picking up a pen and beginning to write. "So can you."

At this, Connie felt the fight go out of her. She exchanged worried glances with Mike and the two of them had left Jack's office and returned to his. He instructed Connie to prepare the necessary paperwork, dropping the charges against both Derek and Carly, and he didn't look at her as did so.

Connie picked at a loose thread on her sweater. "What about Bernard and Lupo?" she inquired.

"I'll call them," Mike said. "Let them know how everything turned out."

"You're going to get an earful," she observed unnecessarily.

"I know." He sat down at his desk and began scrolling through his Blackberry, still without looking up.

The conversation, such as it was, was plainly over. Connie shrugged and left the room. She had a phone call of her own to make – once again breaking plans with friends to wallow in the aftermath of a bad day. She sat down at her desk and looked sadly at the gym bag she had stashed under it, containing jeans, a t-shirt, canvas shoes – everything she'd brought for a night out at a friend's bowling-themed birthday. A night at the self-consciously "ironic" Bowlmor Lanes, surrounded by NYU students, with loud music and fried food and pitchers of beer – a night which had actually held some appeal the night before – had lost her interest. She had tried, in the past, to drag herself out after a bad case, ordering herself not to let work run her life, to compartmentalize, to buck up, and each time had ended up either having one too many beers and growing verbose and maudlin (an embarrassing combination), or simply withdrawing to the margins, silent and brooding (less embarrassing but tedious, nonetheless). In either case, terrible company.

She sighed and made the call, thankful to able to leave a message on voicemail, and suggesting that she make it up some other way. A quiet dinner, drinks, maybe brunch. She knew it was a hollow gesture. She no longer bothered to explain the reasons ("it was a bad one this time"; "long day"; "terrible verdict"). Everyone she knew had received them before. Everyone she knew had long since realized that "I can't make it" translated to "I can't deal with it."

The few hours remaining in the rest of the day passed slowly. Connie finished the paperwork dropping the charges, brought it to Mike to sign off on and then into Jack. Mike had stayed subdued throughout, thanking her quietly before turning back to his computer. Half an hour later, passing by his office on her way back to her desk, she saw that he hadn't budged. He was still slumped in his chair, his head still propped on one hand, still tapping away listlessly on the computer's keyboard.

It was only several hours later that it occurred to her that for all her pride in being professional, for all her fervent belief that Mike would gleefully cross boundaries – professional and personal – without a thought while she would be left to maintain them, that it had been the other way around. _She_ had been the one to blur the lines of their relationship by calling him out in front of the cops. _She_ had been offended when he'd pointed it out. _He was right,_ she realized, _I wouldn't have done that to Jack. _She glanced behind her into Mike's office, but the blinds –like the door – had at some point been closed, shutting her out.

There was nothing for it but to wait it, and him, out. The past few weeks had been bad enough; she had no desire to let this fester over the weekend. She packed her belongings neatly and then stayed at her desk as the minutes ticked by, as her colleagues began to turn off computers, pack briefcases, and head to the elevators. The light in Mike's office was still on, and she found herself wondering if he was waiting her out, too – hoping she'd be gone by the time he left.

Hers was the one remaining light in the office when she heard the door behind her open. She turned, and saw Mike register her with a flash of surprise before he looked away to lock the door of his office. He turned towards the elevators, pausing by her desk and meeting her gaze for the first time since they had left Jack's office. She caught the resigned look in his eyes.

He looked down at her silently for a moment, shifting his briefcase from one hand to the other. "Goodnight, Connie," he said at last. "Have a good weekend."

She stood up from her desk. He took a step back. "I wanted to apologize," she told him. "For what happened a couple of weeks ago at the two-seven. For the whole thing, really. You're right. I acted unprofessionally, and you were the one who was able to keep things separate. Whatever's happening, you're still my boss – " (At this, she saw an unreadable expression settle on his face, but she pressed on) " – and I didn't respect that. I'm not saying I was wrong about Carly. I mean, I still think Derek Sherman..."

Here she trailed off, unsure how to finish. Mike took a step closer to her, and she felt his hand on her arm. She looked up. The resigned expression in his eyes was unchanged.

He patted her arm awkwardly. "No harm done, Connie."

"I overstepped," she admitted, finally.

Mike shrugged. "True. And I overreacted. Let's just say we're even and leave it that that."

She managed a faint okay, watching as he turned away from her towards the exit. He'd only taken a few steps before he turned back. She saw him glance quickly around the office, checking for any other late-night stragglers. She could sense him deliberating.

"Just so you know," he said at last, not looking at her, "I do realize that this whole thing has given you all the reason you need to close the door on anything…happening between us."

Connie considered this. "Maybe," she said. "But don't you think that if I was actively looking for reasons to do that, I would have found one by now?" She did her best to soften her tone, but failed. Her voice sounded thin and brittle in her ears. Overly polite. Dispassionate. "It's not like there aren't plenty of them."

He nodded slowly. "I realize that, too."

She looked past Mike and out the window of the office. It was dark outside, and the long winter had reasserted its grip on the city after a few days letup. She could see a few snowflakes waft past in the light reflected from the street. "I guess it's time for that big conversation," she remarked, as much to herself as to him. She was faintly surprised to see him shake his head.

"I'm tired of talking," he said, simply. Then he turned and walked down the hall, away from her. Connie saw him press the button for the elevator. It arrived quickly, and he stepped inside, pressing one button for the lobby and then another – one that closed the elevator doors quickly.

She hesitated. She looked at her desk – the briefcase with the weekend's work stretching out before her, the gym bag indicating yet another night of cancelled plans and disappointments. She made a decision.

When she stepped out into the lobby a minute later, it was empty except for the two night security guards. Her heels tapped on the marble floor, echoing loudly off the walls as she moved quickly to the exit and out the door onto the steps of the building. She saw Mike on the sidewalk at the bottom of the stairs, his arm raised to hail a cab. She reached him just as a taxi pulled up. When she spoke his name, he turned, regarding her curiously as he opened the door of the cab.

Connie stepped forward. "What is it you need from me?" she asked him, realizing that the question was vague, wondering if he'd know what she meant, gambling that he would. And he did. She thought afterwards, _of course he did. _His silence only lasted a moment.

"A leap of faith, Connie."

She nodded, acutely aware of how cold it was outside. The slight snow was now accompanied by a chill wind that whistled up the street. She took a deep breath. "Don't you live around here?"

Mike blinked, confused. "Ninety blocks north."

She took another step forward and carefully put her briefcase and gym bag down. "Close enough," she said, raising one ungloved hand to the side of his face. She noticed the confusion on his face deepen before she closed her eyes and kissed him, briefly, but sweetly. She pulled away. "I'm tired of talking, too."

She picked up her bags and stepped past him and into the cab, simultaneously elated and terrified when, after a moment, he followed her. He looked at her wordlessly as the cabbie waited, staring at them from the rearview mirror. When she nodded, Mike leaned forward into the partition.

"Eighty-nine and Amsterdam," he told the driver. Connie reached across and took his hand, feeling his fingers interlace with hers. The cab lurched away from the curb.

******

It was unlike her. But then, so much about this was unlike her, had been _utterly_ unlike her, that she supposed this was now nothing more than the latest in a recent run of unlikely thoughts and improbable decisions. They'd stayed quiet in the taxi as it headed towards the Upper West Side. When it pulled up in front of an older building, she'd nodded politely at the doorman who opened the door of the cab, but maintained her silence as they walked through the lobby.

Inside his apartment, she dropped her bags on the floor next to his, shrugged out of her coat. He held a hand out to her and she took it. He pulled her towards him and spoke her name. She kissed him. She felt him push her back against the wall, his body against hers, his hands moving over her, no longer tentative. She shifted against him, the cautionary voices in her head silent for once, her mouth on his, her fingers pushing his suit jacket off his shoulders, fumbling with deliberate slowness with the buckle on his belt, teasing, feeling his hands move to her hips, his lips to her throat. She sighed.

There was a moment later – a moment just Before – after he'd led her down the hallway to his bedroom, after bits and pieces of clothing had hurriedly been cast aside, when she caught his eye and it occurred to her that there was about to be no going back – that in a very real sense there was already no going back – that everything was about to change between them. She saw the same thought occur to him, flickering there briefly, before he pushed her hair off her forehead and kissed her, gently at first, then with more heat, his tongue teasing hers.

And then he was inside her and they were moving together. He closed his eyes. She stopped thinking.

*******

It wasn't nice and polite, she thought afterwards. The way he laced his fingers through hers, pinioning her hands – each on one side of her head – wasn't nice and polite. The words he murmured in her ear definitely weren't nice and polite. Neither, of course, were the words she whispered back to him. Not even close to nice and polite. _Good. Yes. Finally._

*******

She surfaced from sleep several hours later, for a moment unsure of where she was before becoming gradually aware of Mike beside her, his arm draped over her hip, breathing steadily as he slept. She felt a familiar flash of panic _(not me, this is not me)_, and toyed with the idea of leaving. She turned over carefully in his arms to face him, smiling despite herself as he shifted and blinked sleepily at her.

"Hey," she said, softly.

He smiled back, and raised a hand to the side of her face. He kissed her, carefully this time – almost affectionately. She responded.

This time it was slow, almost leisurely. When she dozed off again, she didn't wake until morning.

******

When she did wake up fully, it was with a start. The room was dim, but she could see the light of day from behind the curtains. She glanced around. Not her apartment. Mike's apartment. _Oh boy. _She had a dim memory of waking slightly, feeling him leave the bed and hearing, at a distance, the sound of a shower. She turned over, gazing around the room: off-white walls with a few framed pictures, dark furniture, hardwood floors. She struggled out of bed, noticing that her gym bag and briefcase had, at some point, migrated from the foyer to the end of the bed. She took a moment to be thankful that she had a change of clothes and prayed – successfully – that she would find a bathroom off the bedroom. She picked up her bag, closed the door of the bathroom, and sat down on the edge of the tub, staring into space. _This is not me. Not me, not me, not me. _

She emerged from the bedroom twenty minutes later, showered and changed, and followed the smell of coffee to the kitchen. She passed through the living room to do so, catching sight of what appeared to be a guest room converted into an office, and all of it furnished similarly to the bedroom. Simple, tasteful, comfortable. She wondered why she was surprised by that _(You were expecting what, exactly, Consuela? Just a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and a docking station?)_ as she found her way to the kitchen, where he was perusing the newspaper. She opened her mouth to say something – _good morning; hello; I have to go;_ some standard greeting – when it died on her lips and she heard herself instead say, in a tone of mock-disappointment and to her own astonishment –

"Honestly, Mike. The _Post_?"

He turned and grinned at her, as if the question – as if Connie Rubirosa appearing in his kitchen on a Saturday morning – wasn't completely out of the ordinary. "Great sports section," he explained, before raising an eyebrow. "Anyway, don't you read every single issue of Fashionelle?"

"That is completely different," she informed him with affected hauteur. Then she peered more closely at him, and took a step closer. "You're wearing glasses."

Mike frowned, momentarily confused. "Oh. Right." He raised a hand to touch the frames of his glasses, self-consciously. "I haven't put my contacts in yet."

She smiled. "They're cute."

"Cute," he repeated.

Connie shrugged and stepped a little closer. "Kind of…hot."

Mike laughed, disbelievingly. "Uh-huh." He reached out and tucked a stray strand of her hair behind her ears, tilting his head at the expression that flitted across her face.

A brief silence followed as she looked around the kitchen. Mike's kitchen. With Mike in it, wearing jeans and a well-worn, blue _Columbia Law _tee-shirt, looking like…a regular guy. Of all things. "This a little weird," she commented. "I mean, not _bad_ weird, necessarily. Just…"

"Weird," Mike finished. "I know." He appeared to deliberate for a moment. "Any regrets?"

Connie considered. "No," she said at last. "I don't think so. You?"

"None."

She stepped forward and into his arms, thinking to herself that she'd never done this. Kissed him, yes. Fallen into bed with him, yes. Stood almost chastely within the circle of his arms, her head resting on his shoulder, feeling his grip tighten around her? No. It surprised her that this had come last. She turned her face into the crook of his neck and relaxed against him. He was warm. She could smell, faintly, the soap of his morning shower.

She pulled back slightly, her own arms still looped around his waist. "Do I smell coffee?"

"Freshly made."

"By you?" she asked, suspiciously.

Mike released her with a smile. "I can handle coffee, Connie."

"Can you handle breakfast? I haven't eaten since yesterday's lunch."

"I can handle ordering breakfast in," he replied, pouring out her coffee and handing it to her. "There _may_ also be a copy of the _New York Times_ somewhere around here, since you're too good for the _Post._"

She stepped past him towards the fridge, ruffling his hair as she did so, opening the door to withdraw the milk for her coffee. "My knight in shining armor."

"Let's hope so."

Connie glanced at him quickly, but he had opened a drawer and was now shuffling through a pile of take-out menus. His hair was falling in his face, and she suddenly noticed how different he looked outside the office, with the jeans and the law school shirt and the early hour of the weekend morning removing the usual combination of cockiness and aggression from his features. He looked nice. Real. She stood beside him to peer over his shoulder at the takeout menus. _Okay_, she thought. _So this is how it starts, even if I don't know what "it" is. Even if he doesn't. And maybe, just this once, I can worry about that later._


	12. Chapter 12

**In and around Rapture and Bailout**

Within a month Connie had made several observations about Mike – observations derived from the flood of information that, she supposed, invariably resulted from sleeping with a colleague rather than just working with him. Actually, there were several things that resulted from sleeping with a colleague, she decided, not least of which was the fact that she questioned the decision nearly every day. Whatever "it" was between them, "it" still hadn't been labeled. _Under normal circumstances that would be…well, normal,_ she thought. _Under these circumstances, it's kind of alarming._

Observation number one was the difference between Mike Cutter at the office and Other Mike. Mike Cutter-at-the-office was single-minded, aggressive, a little – okay, more than a little – intimidating. Mike-at-the-office scared junior colleagues, defense lawyers, cops, suspects. Mike-at-the-office worked all hours and never seemed tired. This was the Mike Cutter whom she'd overheard referred to by the baby ADAs, only semi-jokingly, as "the Terminator."

(_"Cutter? The Terminator?" another newbie had asked once, within Connie's earshot. "I don't get it." _

_Connie had overheard knowing laughter from the group clustered around the photocopier. "You know that quote from the movie," someone else had explained: " 'it can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, remorse, or fear and it absolutely will not stop'? That's Cutter."_

_Connie had turned around in her chair. "Can you people take it somewhere else, please?" she'd inquired, with uncharacteristic irritably. "Some of us have work to do.")_

So there was that Mike. The Mike she'd known for the first six months of their working together, before he'd become a friend. Before he'd then become…whatever it was he'd become.

Then there was Other Mike. Other Mike, she learned, ran on the treadmill in his apartment building's gym nearly every day, blasting cacophonous music through the headphones of his iPod. (_"It relaxes me, Connie." Then, off a look – "I can't relax by sitting still.")_ Other Mike, surprisingly, knew how to cook, and was pretty good at it, even though he didn't do it that often. Other Mike could not be peeled away from certain spaghetti westerns if they were showing on the television – even if (especially if, apparently) he'd seen them a thousand times before, and already had them on DVD. Other Mike usually had three or four books that he was reading at any one time. (On the go currently: a "cultural encyclopedia" of baseball; a Kennedy biography; a futuristic action/adventure novel about a World War III that Other Mike gleefully dubbed "terrible"; and a dog-eared copy of _The Things They Carried_.) Other Mike did not, however, consider reading the weekend newspaper to be a solitary endeavor. Other Mike considered that articles of interest should be discussed, shared and/or complained about on the spot. Other Mike had a younger brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew who were living in Boston (_"Red Sox territory. I'm so disappointed in them."), _whom he spoke to regularly. Other Mike rarely slept through the night without at some point waking up and writing something down – a thought about the case, a good opening line for court – or getting up to work or read himself back to sleep.

Other Mike wasn't romantic – not in the usual sense of the word. (This last, she realized, was a suspicion rather than a confirmed fact: the possible result of the lack of label on whatever "it" was between them.) Still, Other Mike would sometimes unexpectedly surprise her, one time casually – and a little shyly – informing her out of the blue (while she stood in his kitchen in leggings and an oversize t-shirt, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes), that she was beautiful, so beautiful. By the time she'd processed the words and turned to gape at him, mouth hanging open, he'd already moved on to other subjects, flicking through the previous day's mail, checking his Blackberry for messages. Other Mike's eyes would light up unapologetically when she arrived to meet him after work, and he would smile and reach out to touch her face, her arm, her hair, as if reassuring himself that she was real.

******

Observation number two: Mike was, to her relief, proving better at being careful about the whatever-it-was than she'd thought he could be. The first Monday back at work after the Friday night (and fine, Saturday night) they'd spent together saw Connie arrive at the office via the courthouse, where – not trusting the juniors on an important case – she'd been personally filing a motion that definitely absolutely had to be filed first thing. Following a message from Jack's assistant, she'd returned to work and walked directly into Mike's office and into the middle of a meeting between Mike and Jack, and the three of them had discussed how to proceed on the recent attempts to arrest one George Darvey – a suspect in a recent homicide who was currently hiding out at the Iranian Permanent Mission.

The meeting had lasted another hour, with Connie interjecting, taking notes, and agreeing next steps with the two of them. Mike had greeted her with a polite good morning upon her arrival, and betrayed no sign of, well, anything. When Jack left, Mike had given her some final instructions on the case, and asked her to liaise with Lupo regarding the detective's plans to meet with a former intelligence contact. It was only as Connie had stood up to leave that he'd added, totally offhandedly, that he couldn't stop thinking about her.

She'd paused in the middle of gathering up her files and smirked at him. "Mr. Cutter, I'm not sure that's appropriate."

"In that case I'd better not tell you exactly _what_ I've been thinking."

"Even more inappropriate?" she'd inquired.

He'd barely looked up from his Blackberry as he scrolled through his latest messages, but his voice was soft, unmistakably flirtatious. "Downright unseemly."

Connie had raised an eyebrow and left the room.

*****

Observation number three: although Mike was (again – to her relief) proving better at being careful about the whatever-it-was at work, she herself was proving worse at it than she'd hoped. Granted, she'd hoped she'd never find herself in this kind of situation in the first place. Now that she was, though, she had decided to consider anything less than an absolute and scrupulous delineation between the professional and the personal to be a failure on her part. So when she found herself…scratch that, when _they'd _found _them_selves on the couch in his office one evening, the door closed, the blinds drawn, clothing semi-unbuttoned, she'd remembered, first, her promise to herself and, second, that this really, really, was the kind of thing that was tempting fate.

She'd pushed him away gently. "This isn't a good idea," she'd pointed out.

He'd smiled at her. "What isn't?"

"You, me, the couch."

"Good point. Why should the couch get all the fun?"

"Michael – "

"That chair," (and here he'd nodded in the direction of the chair behind his desk) "has been extremely underutilized. So has the table, come to think of it. The desk is doing okay, relatively speaking…."

Connie paused in the middle of smoothing her hair and elbowed him. He lapsed into silence, putting an arm around her shoulders, while she rested her head on his chest.

"It's just so…tawdry-office-affair," she explained, receiving a non-committal "hmm" noise in response. She thought for a moment, then asked, "Is it technically an affair if both parties are single?"

Mike chuckled. "If I recall correctly," he said, adopting a semi-serious tone, "I think the whole concept of an 'affair' just means that there's something illicit about it. In which case, yeah…I guess this qualifies."

_And how about tawdry? _she wanted to ask, but didn't. Instead she simply made her own non-committal "hmm" noise and let the subject drop.

*****

Observation number four: there were three kinds of situations where he used her full name. Three distinct intonations when saying it. The first: communicating deep and pretend disappointment with her – teasing her – in which case her full name became two words, as it did the time he'd stepped out of her apartment to pick up a copy of the _New York Post_ and had returned to find her draped across the couch, staring transfixed at the television, and so distracted that she hadn't noticed his reappearance until he spoke.

"Con. Suela."

She jumped and turned her gaze from the TV to see him leaning against the wall, a folded copy of the paper under one arm, shaking his head at her.

"What?" she'd asked, innocently.

"What are you watching?"

Connie grinned beatifically. "Wife Swap. It's this reality show and – "

"Jesus." Mike pushed himself off the wall and walked over the couch, lifting her legs and placing them across him as he sat down. "You have the worst taste in television of anybody I've ever met," he said, shifting himself so that he was leaning over her.

"Fortunately you find it endearing," she added.

Mike dropped a kiss on the tip on her nose. "That's true," he admitted. "That's very true." He straightened up and opened the newspaper directly to the sports section. She could feel his gaze on her every once in a while – could see him, out of the corner of her eye, smiling at her affectionately.

She thought that maybe he was falling in love with her. She wasn't sure how she felt about that.

The second kind of situation where he used her full name – the second intonation: breathless and low. One word mingling with others. As, for instance, following his participation as a speaker on the City Bar Association panel, which he hadn't, ultimately, managed to slide his way out of.

As she promised, she'd attended, and had watched with no small amount of admiration. She'd learned, over the years, that eloquence in the courtroom didn't necessarily translate to eloquence outside it. She'd seen many attorneys – for the defense, for the prosecution – whose ability to articulate themselves apparently vanished when they left the courthouse. The same people who could deliver a stunning summation could then turn into the worst after-dinner speakers. She wasn't particularly surprised to find out that Mike was not one of them. He sat on the panel and discussed criminal law reform easily. Brilliantly, even – fielding questions and challenges from fellow panelists and from the floor with ease.

Afterwards, at the reception, she'd congratulated him briefly, then lost track of him. She found herself engaged in conversation with a public defender she'd met once or twice previously. The public defender was eager to talk, eager to impress her. She smiled benignly at him. When she crossed the room to put down her empty wine glass she found Mike at her elbow.

"You've looked around?" he inquired politely.

"A bit," she admitted. "Impressive building."

He led her down an empty corridor, making small talk. Distant, polite, professional. It could have been in the direction of the exit. It wasn't. He opened a door on his right. "Ever been in the Seymour Room?"

She shook her head and stepped inside, looking around. "It's nice," she observed, before turning to look at him, frowning slightly as he closed the door behind them and turned the lock. Realization dawned. "Oh." Then – "Here?"

He raised an eyebrow at her. "Why? Am I keeping you from your conversation with the nice young man in the cheap suit?"

She reached out, grabbed his tie, and pulled him close to her. "Shut up, Mike."

He kissed her. She felt him back her up against the wall as her common sense abandoned her. She kissed him back, wrapping one leg around his waist, aware that one of his hands was pushing her skirt higher, while the other was undoing his belt buckle.

She considered afterwards that they had both tried their best to stay quiet. At the end, a low moan escaped her and she was dimly aware of his voice in her ear _(connieohgodconsuela)_.

She thought that maybe the whatever-it-was was just sex. She wasn't sure how she felt about _that_, either.

The third kind of situation where he used her full name was with an intonation she couldn't identify. It happened just once within those first two months, as the case against George Darvey threatened to collapse due to the perjured testimony of Reverend Reese. Connie had accompanied Mike to the church where Reese was praying, and had used her knowledge of the bible _(how long was it since she'd been to Mass? she thought guiltily)_ to persuade the Reverend to tell the truth.

Mike had been silent on the subject after they left the church, and silent on the ride back to the office. She wondered whether he approved, whether he thought she'd put him in an awkward position, holding her hand out to him the way she had done – requiring his clearly reluctant participation in the impromptu prayer circle. It was only after Reese testified truthfully, after the guilty verdict was in, that his opinion became clear. They walked down the hall to the elevators with Jack, who wondered aloud, and more than a little sarcastically, whether God had told Reeves to tell the truth.

"God and Connie," Mike had responded proudly, looking at her. Smiling at her.

She saw the light of admiration shining in his eyes. It made her blush slightly. She tried to downplay it, worried that Jack would see what she did.

Later, at his apartment, as she searched his kitchen cupboards for a cheese grater, she'd laughed about it, told him that she was worried she'd manipulated the Reverend. Mike had come up behind her, retrieving the cheese grater from the drawer beside her, and wrapping his arms around her waist.

"Consuela," he murmured in her ear. "You did great. You always do." His lips brushed the nape of her neck briefly before he released her. "Of course, I could tell you were a brilliant attorney the moment I first saw you two years ago."

Connie turned to face him, kissed him absently, and slid past him.

"Spatula?" she asked.

"Third drawer down."

She opened the door and withdrew the spatula, watching as Mike reached into the shelf above her to get a bottle of wine. She frowned. "It hasn't been two years," she pointed out.

"What hasn't?"

"We met a year ago, not two years."

He smiled at her. "I know. I first _saw_ you two years ago."

"I don't remember that," she said. She began to crack eggs into a bowl, wondering if she actually remembered how to make a frittata, and secretly suspecting that her version of a frittata was just an omelet with more stuff in it. She saw Mike shrug.

"It was just in passing," he told her. "I was leaving Arthur's office. You were going in. We didn't speak."

"Are you sure it was me?"

Mike glanced at her briefly before returning to opening the wine. "Your hair was shorter than it is now," he said. "You were wearing a dark blue sweater and a black skirt, and I thought you were…stunning." He smiled, a little awkwardly. "The next time I saw you was when Jack introduced us a year later."

She remembered that. And she distinctly remembered Jack's pep talk on the way to meet the new EADA.

_("His name's Michael Cutter," Jack had told her. "His last stint was as a bureau chief in narcotics. Very good reputation. Excellent, as a matter of fact. A bit…abrasive, I'm told."_

_Connie had rolled her eyes. "Define 'abrasive'."_

_Jack had smiled paternally at her and patted her on the shoulder. "Nothing you can't handle, Connie. Chin up.")_

Now, a year later, she realized that Mike had uncorked the wine and poured out a couple of glasses, passed one across to her, and was looking at her oddly. No surprise there. She'd been staring at him, bewildered, for the last thirty seconds. She murmured her thanks, accepted the glass and returned to cracking eggs.

She thought that maybe she was falling in love with him. She was terrified.

*******

A month later, she stopped being terrified and started feeling…something she wasn't quite sure she wanted to deal with. Not at the moment. Maybe not ever. A month later, not coincidentally, was the second time she saw him shaken up by a case. _Not just shaken up, _she clarified to herself. _Despondent. _

They'd failed to convict Ronnie Aldridge (leader of the _Fresh Horizons_ youth group) of the murder of a woman named Blair Carlson. Aldridge was guilty – no doubt about it – but the kidnapping plot gone astray had been blamed by Aldridge's lawyer on the wealthy CEO of a failed investment group. The CEO had been dating Blair Carlson. The CEO had failed to pay the "ransom." It was the CEO's fault, Aldridge's lawyer argued. The jury – who like everyone else were still reeling from the effects of the financial crisis – were more than happy to agree.

When Connie walked tentatively into Mike's office a few hours after the not-guilty verdict she found him behind his chair, leaning his arms on it, staring into space. She told him he'd done everything right, everything he could. Jack had entered the room at that point, had pointed out that Mike had done everything except win.

Connie shot him a look. Jack caught it. Amended himself, and suggested mildly that Aldridge's lawyer didn't nullify the jury – Dow Jones did. Connie supposed it was Jack's way of trying to reassure Mike. She'd seen Mike wince at Jack's first remark; she supposed Jack had, too.

When Mike had later passed by her desk with only the faintest "good night", she hadn't been particularly surprised, and she didn't follow him. When she left the office an hour or so later, she didn't call him She'd already decided that she needed a stiff drink herself, regardless of whether Mike was or was not currently sitting at the bar of the little place ten or so blocks away from Hogan Place – a bar he particularly liked because it was blessedly free of other lawyers.

But he was there. Sitting at the bar, scrolling through his Blackberry and occasionally glancing up at the football game on the TV. Of course.

She came up behind him, placing her hands on his shoulders, before resting her chin on his shoulder. She was gratified when he leaned his head against hers wordlessly.

She took the seat next to him and gestured at his glass, half-full of some amber liquid.

"How many?" she inquired.

"This," he told her, nodding in the direction of the glass and slurring only a little bit, "would be number four." He turned to face her. "I sent you an email or three."

She withdrew her Blackberry and peered at it. "They must have arrived after I left work."

He nodded and took a long pull of his drink, draining it.

Connie stood up. "We should get you into a cab."

They moved to the door. Outside, he hailed a taxi.

"Are you getting in the cab with me?" he asked.

She shook her head. "It's a work day tomorrow. I don't have any of my stuff at your place."

"Right." He nodded and seemed to consider something for a moment. "We should fix that."

She raised an eyebrow at him.

He shrugged. "You should have some things there. A toothbrush, I guess. A change of clothes. Whatever it is you…" He trailed off, noting her raised eyebrow. "What?"

"Why do I get the feeling that's a big step for you?" she asked, smirking at him. When he grinned, a little embarassed, she added, "Sometimes a toothbrush is just a toothbrush, Mike. It's doesn't have to _mean_ anything."

He studied her for a moment. "No," he agreed. "Definitely not." Then, perhaps startled by the vehemence of his tone, he said more gently. "Thank you. For coming here, I mean."

She nodded and he leaned in and kissed her. She could taste the whiskey on his breath. He pulled back after a moment, and kissed her on the forehead. He seemed about to speak; he changed his mind. The cabbie gunned the engine of the car, hinting at his impatience, and Mike opened the door for her, informing her that he'd hail another cab for himself. As her taxi pulled away, she turned around to look back at him, and saw him heading back into the bar.


End file.
